Pippo 2017

David Michael Hinnebusch made "Pippo", a 56 x 71 cm painting, with what looks like acrylic paint or maybe mixed media, and it feels like a real explosion of color and energy. There’s this layering of marks, like Hinnebusch is building up the image through pure gesture. You can see it in the way the colors bleed into each other, the hot pinks fighting with the cool blues, and these sharp black lines cutting through the chaos. It’s a real process-oriented thing, where the painting seems to be finding its form as it goes. Look at those eyes, for instance. They're not about realism; they're about feeling, about expression. And around them, the paint is thin in some places, thick in others, like he's pushing and pulling at the surface, trying to get something just right. Hinnebusch reminds me a bit of Jean-Michel Basquiat, in the way he uses raw, unfiltered emotion. But Hinnebusch has his own voice, his own way of making the personal universal. It’s a kind of ongoing conversation that never really settles.