Lady Without Matching Purse and Shoes

Lady Without Matching Purse and Shoes

oil graffiti on bathroom wall

c. 1647

Fluvio's output of work while at the St. Avian Asylum for the Psychologically Troubled was truly prodigious. During his 7,821 day stay he managed to produce 7,355 detailed finished works, 13,723 sketches, drawings, and doodles, along with 595 incomplete and abandoned paintings, plus 13 crude unconsented tattoos. While Fluvio's work became increasingly sophisticated at S.A.A.P.T., he never lost the crude and ruthless approach that really set him apart from the established art community. Lady Without Matching Purse and Shoes, however, represents a tangential departure for him, although there are elements of it that would resurface later in his greatest masterpiece of all, I Don't Believe In True Stories. Conceived beneath a urinal in a flood of tears, along with Lady Without Matching Purse and Shoes II and III, the accompanying involuntary tattoos in the series, it represents the moment at which he found himself released from earthily bonds. He emerged from the bathroom incident in a euphoric state and when he found Henrick von Schleck, and later Svetlana Ivanivic, tethered in containment jackets and drugged, in a fit of beneficence he gifted them with equally impressive works. But rather than having an emotional breakdown and the risk of cliché, he transcended his environment and instead, within the confines of an asylum, had the audacity to have an emotional breakup. Many historians point to this event as the seminal moment which galvanized his commitment to his eventual jailbreak three months later.