In his short career, Noah Davis breathed new life into painting. With imagery derived from a mix of
In his short career, Noah Davis breathed new life into painting. With imagery derived from a mix of photographs, mass culture, and his own imagination, Davis’ canvases are as haunting as they are magical. He captured domestic interiors and suburban landscapes with equal ease—settings in which figures and our relationship with them oscillate between intimacy and alienation. It is hard to put his visual poetry into words, but I’d argue that it is precisely his manipulation of his chosen medium that is his greatest and most expressive achievement. Through his inventive handling of oil paint on canvas, Davis was able to collapse divergent modes of seeing and representing. If we read his work as environmental portraiture, then Davis shows us how our bodies and identities are not ontologically distinct from our surroundings, but rather constituted by and thus inseparable from them. If we read his work as impressionistic snapshots of place or memory, then Davis gives us a visual allegory for how processes of remembering take place—layers build upon and obscure the ones beneath, events blur into each other and refuse to cohere, logic fades while emotion holds firm, and people and our mental images of them melt, blur, and bleed into each other. Davis achieves this epistemological dynamism entirely through his manipulation of painting itself, embracing seemingly contradictory modes of realism, expressionism, and impressionism within the same canvas and coaxing them into cooperation. By centering African American subjects, he calls our attention to the particular urgency of a project of black representation that allows for difficulty and irresolution rather than essentialist identification.Noah Davis, Untitled, 2015 -- source link
#noah davis