David Ligare

David Ligare is a California-based representational painter of landscape, figurative and still life works. His paintings employ formal principles and ideas from Greco-Roman art and Classical history painting in the service of philosophical contemplations of contemporary existence. He has sometimes been characterized as a photorealist, however, many critics reject that categorization. They identify an uncanny, timeless element in his work focused on moral concerns, the past and idealized subjects rather than the reproduction of photographic reality, which belies the photorealist label. Critic Donald Kuspit termed Ligare's paintings "covertly abstract as well as overtly realistic, and thus peculiarly surreal. Formally beautiful as well as insightfully true to appearances, and responsible to the cultural heritage of Classical antiquity, they fuse modernism and traditionalism."