The four canvases on display from Noah Davis’s 2013 show, ‘The Missing Link’, are large and consuming. In one, an anonymous Black man carries a briefcase, walking through an unknown urban landscape of Rothco-style block colour and concrete. The next is all mottled, moving marks of green and purple foliage, blending and blurring into shadows as an ominous man sits in the middle, holding a gun. Another is grid-like: small, static squares outline the windows of a building towering over swimmers at leisure, the messy paint of the water in fluid contrast to the rigid architecture above. The last image is different, again: Black bodies in motion, faded and fleeting like an out of focus photo, a single figure propelling above the rest, as if in flight.
Davis, the Los Angeles painter known for his figurative works depicting dreamlike visions of everyday Black life, was not one to be pigeonholed: each canvas here is technically unique, yet they still work as a set, each brushstroke deliberate, considered. In this retrospective, we are taken into his personal life: ‘Painting for My Dad’, created when he lost his father, shows a backturned figure standing on the rocky edge of the Earth, peering into the wide, open darkness; the unknown, unforgiving gravitational pull almost visceral. We discover his deep, well-referenced knowledge of art history and glimpse into his Underground Museum, the Arlington Heights gallery he co-founded with his wife, Karon Davis, in 2012. We learn about his hopes and dreams, where vast canvases show scenes of his crime-striken neighbourhood transformed into a utopia where Black ballerinas dance in the street, and about his curatorial ambitions, before we are taken out the other side: three final paintings standing as beautiful, sad contemplations on rest and suffering and death, made only weeks before he died of cancer aged only 32.
Davis pushed back against the perceived expectations of the art world. He represented ordinary Black life as it was, not glamourised or fetishised or stereotyped. Still, there’s an element of the uncanny about it all – sometimes sinister, otherworldly – or a sense that things were not always this way. In one room, projectors flash up photographs he found at flea markets to use as source material: a teriyaki chicken shop, abandoned TVs on the sidewalk, lifesize cardboard cut-out figures in a home. It was this ability to find the fantastical in the everyday that made Davis’s work so interesting, that allowed him to bottle up multiple possible storylines into one singular, static image. Sometimes, he ventures into the surreal: like the smaller-sized mixed media ‘Seventy Works’ series, where he collaged a photo of a weeping police officer and a cut-out image of polished woodwork, curving like a naked body. Often, faces in paintings are blurred and empty; in some works, he references Egyptian mythology; others are pure fairytale fantasy, like the ‘40 Acres and a Unicorn’, which shows a Black man riding the mythical horned beast.
Davis was an artist that played with paint, commanded it. The result, shown in this substantial, moving exhibition of an artist we lost too early, was a body of work which was quietly, yet urgently political.
