daving with davis -part 2
Kristina Bivona, USA
27 January 2022
This is Part 2 of a four-part essay. Read the previous part here and the following one here.
David Zwirner 2020
I do not remember what I saw first when I finally got to where I was going. I was just glad to see it was not so busy. Big galleries are hard to keep up with, they are lofty and feel rich and stark. At David Zwirner I was so taken by what the space was that I was not there. White, sterile, and elite, these galleries are cold in their demarcations of class. Staff passed congenial whispers where most of the viewers were but a passerby to the art. Like the staff, we passerby’s never live with the work– we only tour it here. I pushed that static out of my mind and walked through a foyer into the first room. I did feel relieved, as I was quickly taken with the paint.
Noah Davis, Untitled, 2015, oil on canvas, 32 x 50 inches, 81.3 x 127 cm, © The Estate of Noah Davis, courtesy The Estate of Noah Davis and David Zwirner.
Davis’s paintings had so much in them that made me love painting. I saw his collection of colors, his reference to form, his understanding of space, and his awareness of his own hand. I saw on each canvas where he edited and made grand cuts. I felt the information buried underneath. I saw where he was unconcerned with what the paint did and minded much more about how to not let it sit still. Noah Davis’ paintings reinforced his perception of life and he made this fancy gallery feel off kilter; a little crooked and this felt right and good. Davis painted black life inclusive of strife and love and perseverance. He lived his paintings. He qualified each mark with lifeblood and his paintings made these quarters feel immodestly corrupt.
The Works
The psychological effect of this counterbalance heralded my descent into the small housing units painted with loft and abandon. Davis painted the worlds he knew, family, friends, Los Angeles, and parts of dreams. The paintings were filled with ghostly whims of absent fathers and all too distant mothers. The specters of which consumed whole sections of the gallery while only occupying but a few cubic inches of paint. Untitled (2015) a woman and teen girl sat languid next to a man in a chair all but painted out. This painting had colors that sank like a decaying white tooth. Layers of dental and enamel pain affixed to a canvas where a domestic story played out in one solemn line or two. Untitled presented the milieu of family affairs and the tones of dreaming through a homely Los Angeles.
To be around these fractures in paint was familiar and soothing. See, I am a child of disrepair, scarcity, and overcompensation. I was so surprised someone had accessed the trigger points of pain like he did. The paintings were not loose; they did not play, nor were they tight and rigid. They had flat moments that built into tense crescendo where the figures were raised and then tore below the paint. I disavowed what I knew as my entry points to the work. These paintings had much more to do with a history of painting collapsed than in bridging the textbook images of Manet’s flatness I knew too well. I was once taught to read those textbook images but the elevation of those paintings made them so unspecial. Here I was able to see where art was in life.
Uncramped Life Vibrato
Noah Davis, Pueblo del Rio: Concerto, 2014, oil on canvas, 48 x 72 inches, 121.9 x 182.9 cm, © The Estate of Noah Davis, courtesy The Estate of Noah Davis and David Zwirner.
Instead of Manet I am led to the complex human landscapes of Barclay Hendricks where flat painting tells a dawning contemporary story. The story of pressure and subversion and the multi-dimensional flatness. This story returned me most to one painting, of a man in a parking lot on a flat landscape in an unknown-to-me LA. That man played a reverie on a grand piano under a crayon periwinkle sky in Pueblo Del Rio: Concerto (2014). In this romantic reality in my mind, in this open space with sideways vaulting buildings he played into the æther. This separated and desolate space is filled with the cadence of a rich well-tuned piano, but its reverberations go off into nowhere. Maybe the sounds ping and glimmer inside the distant silo on the near horizon of the landscape?
This is where black folks lived, whose habits were popularized in MTV culture and in Hollywood movies but then scrutinized in media. The flatness of Davis’ paintings reverberate through 90’s white news network propaganda. It is ambiguous but known. Crack and guns and drive-by’s were all the government and television wanted to tell us stories about. They flattened reality and wanted us to see Rodney King murdered again and again on TV (ABC News, 1991). Behind the mass media distortion healing, quiet, and the solidarity of seeing red maintained the homes Davis painted. No newscaster or journalist gave primetime support to Compton and East LA and Arlington Heights. So Davis painted the elegance and vivacity and disproportion back in. He painted the undulations and pause that white media ignored in place of constant aggression and bias in the news. He painted it flat in aesthetic and dimensional in spirit.
The surface pulled asunder in Pueblo Del Rio: Concerto. The tears curiously echoed in the sinking temperature of muted greys, blues, and browns. In Pueblo Del Rio: Concerto there is a domicile (maybe it’s not a home, maybe it is a church?), the lights are on and in the left corner an in-between industrial setting plays out slow and uncramped. The implacable strangeness is then broken up by the verdant foliage of a familiar tree. It is a thriving and vast space with all the imperfections to call it home. There is seldom repetition enough in Pueblo Del Rio: Concerto to predict the next movement of the player’s hand. Instead, the man is seated as if to practice. His hands are poised and his posture is working for every note. But he is comfortable; he is doing what he wants to do and he sits to play to an open and invisible audience.
This piano man played the notes that were missed, the notes that others messed up and took away. This man at the piano played a sound that cut though the 90’s pop culture Americana of East Coast v West Coast hip hop feuds and propaganda imagery. A cadence similar to the media’s wartime vaudeville where atrocity was mocked for entertainment in the Gulf War (Baudrillard, 1994). The storyline of 90’s media clogged up my head but those reproductions did not exist here. He played through the noise of the news debasing and imitating the lives of real people. It was a clean sound ringing true and bright through a paralleled air. I can look through at the painting in my mind’s eye like it caps a high ceiling but I cannot reach it to touch.
I ask myself:
What is it doing up there anyway?
Held On To: The side room at David Zwirner
Installation view, Noah Davis, David Zwirner, New York, January 16–February 22, 2020, © The Estate of Noah Davis, courtesy The Estate of Noah Davis and David Zwirner.
Pueblo Del Rio: Concerto was set amidst the main gallery at David Zwirner. The painting played rhythmically into two large white rooms where beyond the foyer and down the hall there was a quaint but powerful staging. It filled me with warmth and welcome. This installation lifted storytelling to a place with no straight lines of time. I could see in the collections displayed the way Davis handled materials as erasure, color, subject matter, and space. No one object defined any moment but strung along each moment into another.
Around the right side of the room was a leggy sofa and a few chairs. Sound and light from BLKNWS (a long running film project by Davis’ brother Kahlil Joseph) bounced from the right wall set upon the black and grey backdrop of nuns. The presence of BLKNWS in the space drove home the media stylings that permeated my mind. Joseph to this day oversees part of The Underground Museum as creative director and his contribution built out a familial scaffold in this space. Nearby, another beam of support rose with a sculpture by Karon Davis. The paper maché figure stood short but poised in the center of the room. It was set within the path of heavy traffic and greeted each passerby with weighted eyes.
I recognized that I was in a soft space. Around the perimeter there were books and pictures, prints and a model. Informal, it was filled with personal effects and the personality of home. The room was just the right size; it offered a closeness for all the people that walked in. The walls gave an embrace. There was a warm but severe setup of personal and made objects that made the room feel cyclical once you were inside. Simply so, I may have felt this vertigo because there was something engaging on all fronts; even the door served a reasonable purpose beyond entry and offered a breath.
All of this visual information excited me but I was reticent. There were four or five people by the sofa and chairs in the middle of the room. I did not want to disturb their looking. So I preserved my thread of thought and I turned myself around. I directed my attention to the unoccupied space by the other wall.
I looked to a bookcase with an assortment of personal items including books, photos, and talismans. I loved them the most: I needed them distinctly. They were a vibrant and most humble element. Those collected objects eased me; they reminded me that what I was seeing was personal. This was a collection of touchstones to the past, present, and future: the saved, the unfinished, and the precious.
Installation view, Noah Davis, David Zwirner, New York, January 16–February 22, 2020, © The Estate of Noah Davis, courtesy The Estate of Noah Davis and David Zwirner.
A few moments after looking and almost touching, I turned back around to take in the fullness of the room. That included finally looking back and expecting to observe people sitting on the sofa. That was when I was surprised and electrified to see there was no one else in that room. I realized this in the mere moment it took to process the visual information. It was but an apparition. I was alone– not in the company of the four or five other people.
I realized this and it unnerved me. I had been alone the whole time and this was only confirmed when two children entered the room. The presence was different with the arrival of children and it shifted my consciousness. Before, I was never alone but by no means was I around people. There was just never anyone seated in the glow of the television, no one resting in the chairs. It was just me seeing and feeling things a little bit extra.
I felt unfounded. I felt a little daft. I had felt information not consumed from a logical mental device. I had walked into that side room that was staged with chairs, books, a movie, works on paper framed on the wall, and thought nothing of a large crystal by the chairs, or the extenuating power of Davis’ personal remembrances. But these were all imbued objects. I did not think that I would be captivated by them most. But it was in the crevices and connection of the collected things that the majority of information to emerged. My perception was cryptic: I was feeling a static electricity that came from the slippages between all things. I assert, it is the space between the facts where meaning is made.
The Space In Between: Understanding the Liminal Space in Paint
Davis’s technical skill likened paint to cut and pasted paper, for which every small space between shapes served as an entry point. The collection of objects did the same– I still see every crevice searing in between them. From the paintings to collected objects, from the visage of a tree and a woman whose body moved as water, I still see small slippages where there were caverns in-between. These spaces in between were only as thick as a few threads of hair. Here, worlds opened up and left stages. Not one image existed by itself. The artwork on the walls did this incredible thing where they seemed to sift you through them.
There was uncanny here. Unfamiliar faces of figures looked away from me; they did not feign connection but had tremolo of something unseen. To observe this energy you have to see beyond the markers that have been reversed. You have to see the difference between the art historical and ancestral painting. That vibrato of interconnection still lingered in the air.
These paintings did not pose in the service of a gallery; they did not pander to its grand and unwavering structure. These paintings, these energies will last far longer than that temporary structure. Noah Davis’ work for me was the like of which one can only see through other eyes. It just matters if you brought your other eyes to see that day.
Slowly Resurfacing
Reference to painters that preceded Davis melted away into his stormy choices to paint over things. I could see where there were beautiful renderings ground out. The figures began again and purposefully never finished. That felt curious and sad, but it was these decisions that kept me from surfacing too soon from the work. As I dove in, I avoided the bends by letting his marks guide me to my intuition and away from what I was taught to see in art. I moved into the work instead of naïvely looking for my own reflection. I got lost. I used his markers to find my way back. I floated and looked, but I never searched. I understood the parts that were not meant for me and was grateful and still felt welcome. Davis painted black life, joyous life, hard work, sadness, and the metaphysical every day. My gut is the only sense I trust when facing work like this.
You can read the next part of this essay here.