Between
January, 1968 and October, 1969, Ronald Davis produced a remarkable
series of twenty-nine paintings roughly twelve feet across in the
shape of dodecagons. These paintings represent a unique synthesis
of the diverse concerns of the artists of his generation (he was
born in 1937) in sustaining modernist painting as a viable vehicle
for experiment and innovation. A native Californian, Davis's preoccupation
with the art of painting was unusual in the context of the LA scene.
At the time, art history in Los Angeles seemed a subject more interesting
to costume films than to young artists anxious to assert their
independence, not only from the European tradition, which they
viewed as exhausted, but also from the "heroism" of the
New York School, that to laid-back Southern California seemed too
much theatrical posturing.
Because
of his programmatic rejection of the concerns of both Paris and
New York, within this context the only modern artist acceptable
as a role model was Marcel Duchamp. The myth of the Dadaist master's
dismissal of painting on canvas as a relic of the dead past had
wide currency in California where two of Duchamp's closest friends
and major collectors, Walter Arensberg, originally of Philadelphia,
and Bill Copley, a wealthy Surrealist dealer, collector and later
a proto-pop artist spread his legend. The main points of Duchamp's
message were 1) that art was merely another object, having no claim
whatsoever to transcendence; 2) but nevertheless those objects
should be as well made as possible because high level craft was
in itself an aesthetic. Duchamp's more sophisticated concerns with
the nature of depicted illusion in relation to the reality of the
object depicted were for the most part too cerebral to be of use
to many at the time. But his preoccupation with craftsmanship became
the most obvious common denominator of the so-called "sunshine
school."
Davis
saw a way to use Duchamp's perspective studies and transparent
plane in the Large Glass for pictorial purposes. Instead of glass,
he used fiberglass to create a surface that was equally transparent
and detached from any illusion of reality. Because his colored
pigments are mixed into a fluid resin and hardern quickly, multiple
layers of color may be applied without becoming muddy. his is essentially
an inversion of Old Master layering and glazing except that color
is applied behind rather than on top of the surface. In a letter
to the Tate Gallery, which had acquired the 1968 painting Vector,
Davis described the technique he began using in 1966:
"Fiberglass
cloth and mat replaced canvas as reinforcement and support for
the colored resin (paint). They were painted with a brush face
down on a waxed Formica table mold. The illusionary plane nearest
the viewer was masked out with tape and painted first, the furthest
away was painted last. Layers of fiberglass impregnated with
resin were laminated to the back of the painting... The completed
painting was peeled from the waxed mold and polished."
Alone
among his contemporaries, Ronald Davis was equally concerned with
traditional problems of painting: space, scale, detail, color relationships
and illusions as he was with the California emphasis on hi-tech
craft and industrial materials. How to reconcile the literal object
– produced with the latest technology – with transcendental metaphor
became the problem that occupied throughout the Sixties.
Renouncing
cloth as ground beginning in 1966, Davis began his experiments
in locating both color and spatial illusion behind the transparent
polished fiberglass surface. his was and remains an unprecedented
venture, abandoned by Davis himself when he returned to linen supports
in the early Seventies, apparently to be able to paint larger works
than a fiberglass support would permit. This preoccupation with
large scale also separates Davis from his West coast contemporaries,
who were more often involved with a jewel-like preciousness or
with installation pieces that considered the altered environment
the work of art.
Davis's
commitment to maintaining the autonomy of painting distinct from
its environment sets him apart from the California aesthetic, linking
him more closely with the concept of painting as a larger than
life, non-objective immaterial experience that the New York School
aimed at. The tension between an emphasis on specific materials
and intrinsic color (the pigment is literally in the plastic) and
the attraction to "unreal" illusions of infinite spatial
projections, suggesting an extraterrestrial infinity where the
projected perspectives could converge only light years from the
present, accounts for the mysterious and provocative tension of
Davis's fiberglass paintings.
Unlike
many leading Southern California artists (Davis moved from San
Francisco to LA in 1964), Davis admired and understood New York
School painters, especially Clyfford Still, who briefly taught
at the San Francisco Art Institute, [prior to the time during]
which Davis attended. Most of his contemporaries could be found
at Chouinard, the Disney School predecessor of Cal Arts. In Davis's
1968-69 paintings, there is an obvious attempt to incorporate elements
of Pollock's spontaneous process of dripping, which solidifies
liquid splattered pigment, and Still's interlocking jagged planes
of paint. What is deliberately missing is the tactility of encrusted
surfaces, of malerisch brushstrokes and the textures of the loaded
brush on top of the support. To make the "painterly" style
new, to give it a fresh interpretation, Davis evolved a highly
original technique based on the local fiberglass technology used
to give glossy streamlined surfaces to cars, boats and surfboards.
This is certainly not what Mondrian meant when he spoke of "plastic
and pure plastic art," but Mondrian's identification of the
picture plane with the surface, in rejection of illusionistic recession,
must be seen as part of Davis's impulse to create an entirely different
set of illusions.
Reaching
far back into art history, Davis combined the geometric volumes
and linear perspective of the Renaissance with the assertive literalness
of eccentrically shaped paintings. The result is a series of powerful
hallucinatory contradictions: in the twelve-sided polygons of 1968-1969,
we seem to be able to see inside the object. In paintings like
Wedge, Lemon Yellow and Zodiac, "hollow" centers suggest
the hurtling discs of a divine game of Frisbee played by the Gods
of endless summers. The contradiction between weightiness (we know
these be heavy objects) and the suggestion of lightness adds another
piquant touch of irony and contradiction.
Because
of the newness of their technique and materials and the striking
physical presence of these paintings, their play between the absolute
materiality of literal objects and the immateriality of deep spatial
illusions constantly contradicting flatness was so startling, Davis's
considerable originality and sophistication as a colorist was rarely
mentioned, largely overlooked and deserves more careful analysis.
In retrospect, these works continue to look as fresh as the day
they were made, which is more than can be said about most of the
art of the period. They continue to intrigue the spectator not
as novelty, but as a successful attempt to keep abstract art alive
in an age where it seems superannuated. Ronald Davis's Dodecagons
remain an unforgettable and still valid high water mark in the
recent history of modern painting.
— Barbara
Rose, 1988