Location: 2277 Monitor Street, Dallas, Texas, 75207
Galleri Urbane is pleased to announce The Florist, an upcoming solo exhibition by Philadelphia-based
painter Stephen D’Onofrio. This marks the artist’s sixth solo show with the gallery and celebrates a
decade-long partnership. Join us for the opening reception on April 15th, from 5:00 to 7:00 p.m., to
meet the artist. The event coincides with the Second Annual Design + Art on Monitor Street Block
Party, which runs from 5:00 to 8:30 p.m.
An essay by Eve Hill-Agnus accompanies this exhibition:
If The Arborist planted D’Onofrio firmly within the still life tradition of the Northern European Golden
Age—among fruit bowls and orchard trees, the pendulous weight of a ripened harvest to come—then
The Florist lavishes attention on an earlier, more volatile moment in the botanical calendar: the flower.
Where fruit is culmination, the bloom is promise, extravagance, the concentrated wager of a plant on
its own future. It is also, of course, the most perishable of subjects.
The organizational conceit of the new work is the flower market stand. In paintings that set ebony-
colored floral buckets against indigo backgrounds (a departure from the artist’s customary raw canvas
or black grounds), the deep, blue-violet hue evokes the prized ancient color dubbed “blue gold.”
From this field of near-darkness, floral abundance erupts in the shallow pictorial space he has made
his signature. What D’Onofrio has always sought is richness—but a richness with architecture beneath
it, compositions that press toward pattern while remaining firmly composed.
Two vases full of lilies—yellow, white, pink, peach-colored—exist as a compressed yet riotously
efflorescent pattern, pistils and stamens pert punctuation amid the lush, compacted forms. In others,
vibrant gerbera daisies, tulips, or sunflowers press into one another with an almost Pop insistence.
This density is never accidental. It exists due to a matrix—a compositional formula, both armature and
invitation, within which the artist can then, to varying degrees, weave motif and painterly expression.
The logic has affinities with textile design and decorative traditions that run from William Morris
through Maija Isola of Marimekko. Yet D’Onofrio’s paintings never surrender wholly to pattern. Get
closer, and the boundary between image and ornamentation begins to waver.
A group of new abstract paintings pushes further into that uncertainty. Looser and more freehanded—
arrived at without the projector and elaborate preparatory drawing that govern other bodies of
D’Onofrio’s work—they present square-format compositions of fallen petals, as though a breeze had
stirred them up and scattered them, disturbing what was once ordered. Brushstrokes quiver and
arc; smears of pigment form a blur of movement. The language approaches Abstract Expressionism in
its vigor, but the spirit is more reminiscent of the whorls and arabesques of Persian miniaturist
illumination. In these more abstract works, with their increased movement, energy, and dynamism, the
viewer is allowed to teeter on the boundary between entropy and order. If we take the risk we remain
alive to what might happen.
Underlying all of this, as in his earlier work, is the memento mori—the acknowledgment that splendor
and decay are not opposites but phases. The bloom that erupts from the bucket is already, in some
sense, doomed, falling. D’Onofrio does not belabor this; the paintings are too full of the pleasures of
color and form to read as elegies. But a quiet wisdom emanates: the nadir is present in the zenith; the
lushest things are also the most fugitive. The florist knows this. So does the painter.
