Lissitzky-Letterhead, 2021

David Diao is renowned for his relentless attempts to refine the notions of form and configuration in his work. He systematically clarifies these ideas, by using pictorial frameworks and conventions, to create text and symbolic typography. Although his later period has been more clearly focussed, on developing a conversation with the great paintings of the Modernist period, Diao's earlier work was mostly based on abstract colour paintings. He'd embraced the aesthetic of the 'colour field movement', and developed a series of canvases where he would apply paint directly across large structures. He has always generously credited a small group of Abstract Expressionist painters such as Barnett Newman, and Ad Reinhardt, as his main influences during that period. He also heavily borrowed from Jackson Pollock's use of images from magazines, motifs from archives, and memorabilia as reference points. Diao's work started to gain recognition in the late 1960's New York art world. By using minimalist structures to simplify his paintings and installations, Diao has successfully managed to expand his interrogations about subject matter, to his current concern on the formalism and plasticity of abstraction. His approach no longer consists in attempting to fill open spaces with content, but rather to analyse how space can actually neutralize the environment delineated by a painting.