Compassion as Medium: Justine Di Fiore’s Pietà at The Bunker

This past Sunday, a friendly crowd descended into the subterranean intimacy of The Bunker—Danny First’s underground gallery nestled beneath his Los Angeles home—for the opening of Pietà, Justine Di Fiore’s latest body of work. The exhibition, which runs through May 25 by appointment, features eleven oil paintings that draw upon the rich iconography of the pietà not simply as religious citation, but as an extended meditation on care, touch, and the transformative potential of painting itself.

While the pietà is traditionally understood as a devotional image of the Virgin Mary cradling the dead Christ, Justine expands the term to encompass its original etymology: pietà as compassion. Her paintings reconsider this gesture, not just as a moment of loss, but as an enduring metaphor for caregiving, empathy, and the reciprocal exchange of holding and being held.

The three paintings highlighted here—Incantation (2025), Time Stops Crucifix (2024), and Love & Devotion (2024), all 55 x 48 inches—offer a distilled glimpse into a practice that is both emotionally charged and materially nuanced. In each, figures emerge slowly from painterly ground, slipping in and out of visibility, as though Justine is gently excavating them from within the paint. Having met her during our residency at the Torrance Art Museum last year, I had the privilege of watching this process unfold firsthand. Her works begin abstractly—color, rhythm, atmosphere—and over time, through deliberate layers of touch, figures begin to form. It's an act of care as much as composition, with each mark infused with feeling and intention.

In Incantation, a luminous figure rises through fields of soft violet, crimson, and teal, as if summoned. There is a devotional quality here, yet one that feels deeply personal rather than liturgical. Justine’s use of touch—visible in the tenderness of the brushwork and the attention to surface—transforms the painting into something that’s as much about presence as it is about subject. It recalls, in tone and mystery, the devotional panels of Fra Angelico or the uncanny intimacy of Pontormo, but stripped of their ornamentation and filtered through a contemporary feminist lens.

Time Stops Crucifix is perhaps the most literal reference to the show’s titular iconography, but even here, Justine resists static symbolism. A cruciform figure hovers amidst golden washes and bruised blues, dissolving into and reconstituting from the painterly ground. Rather than dramatizing suffering, the painting distills it into stillness. The title captures it perfectly: time does not move forward; it suspends. In Justine’s hands, grief becomes elemental—part wind, water, and flesh.

Love & Devotion bring us even closer. A kneeling figure slips almost entirely into its environment, rendered in warm, fleshy reds and dissolving contours. What might once have been a religious posture becomes a gesture of surrender, humility, and affection. Justine’s perspective—shaped by her own experience as a caregiver—invites us into physical proximity with the body, into a tactile relationship with vulnerability. Her marks feel like acts of tending, each brushstroke akin to washing, lifting, or holding.

Throughout the show, Justine’s figures seem to blur with their surroundings—becoming ground, atmosphere, flora, or animal, and even decomposing. Her pictorial spaces do not enforce strict boundaries between flesh and spirit, subject and environment. Instead, everything seeps. Spirit worlds witness. Wind and water slip into limbs. Flesh blooms. This is care rendered as cosmology.

In a moment when contemporary painting often privileges irony or intellectual distance, Pietà does something quietly radical: it believes in touch. It believes in the figure. It believes in compassion—not as sentiment, but as a form of labor, a way of knowing, a way of making. These works aren’t didactic, nor are they illustrations of caregiving; rather, they are themselves acts of care.

Justine Di Fiore, who holds an MFA from UC Davis and teaches painting at Mount Saint Mary’s University and UC Davis, makes her solo debut. With its enclosed architecture and votive lighting, The Bunker becomes the perfect container for these quietly luminous works. They don’t demand reverence, but they leave you with it.

Pietà is on view at Danny First: The Bunker by appointment through May 25, 2025.