Painter
Ronald Davis returns from obscurity
By Kyle MacMillan
Denver Post Critic-at-Large
Thursday, November 14, 2002
Young artists
sometimes burst into the national spotlight, enjoy a decade or so of intense
attention before the art world seems to move on, and then all but disappear
from view.
Some years
later, these same artists are suddenly rediscovered, even though they
had been making and showing work all along, and are touted as something
akin to modern old masters.
This phenomenon
certainly affected painters such as Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis, who
fell almost completely out of favor and are now very much back in vogue.
Something
similar could well be about to happen to the once widely known abstract
painter Ronald Davis, 65, of Arroyo Hondo, N.M., whose name these days
often elicits a look of puzzlement even from art-world professionals.
Gwen Chanzit,
a Denver Art Museum curator of modern and contemporary art, has organized
an exhibition of his recent work at the University of Denver, which has
been extended through Sunday.
And at the
same time, the Butler Institute of American Art in Youngstown, Ohio, is
presenting a retrospective titled "Ronald Davis: Forty Years of Abstraction
1962–2002."
The big moment
for Davis, who was born in Santa Monica, Calif., and grew up in Cheyenne,
came in the 1960s and '70s. If he never quite made the A-list of artists,
he came close.
He was featured
in a 1968 solo show at Leo Castelli in New York City, arguably the most
important gallery of the time, and several major museums purchased his
works that year.
Despite his
success, Davis faded out of sight. The last solo exhibition he lists took
place seven years ago at DEL Fine Arts in Taos.
Davis gained
recognition for abstract paintings that shared similarities with optical
art in that they had an illusionistic or trompe l'oeil quality that tricked
the eye by using vanishing-point perspective to suggest three-dimensionality
where none actually existed.
As the decades
went by, his employment of a perspective grid grew more rigorous and complex
as he began to use three-dimensional computer programs to assist him in
the process.
But in the
24 acrylic paintings that make up the main body of his show at DU, he
has made a surprising U-turn, largely abandoning vanishing-point perspective
and returning to a earlier, freer style.
"Illusion
remains," he writes in an exhibition statement, "but these paintings
are more optical and elusive; given looking time, they move around a lot
in subtle, ambiguous and mysterious ways."
Although
a few of these images suggest recognizable objects such as "I-Beam"
or "Blue-Violet Slab," most of these works take on asymmetrical,
off-balance and sometimes sprawling shapes which are all but impossible
to describe.
All of these
works are relief paintings, which is to say that they all are painted
on "boxes" that Davis has painstakingly constructed out of cut
and glued sheets of polyvinyl chloride, a type of hard plastic. They jut
1 to 3 inches from the wall, with beveled sides.
The painting
surfaces are consistently flat, but because of the trompe l'oeil effects
that Davis achieves with intersecting planes of color, some of the works
appear to have raised or lowered sections.
All of these
works are relief paintings, which is to say that they all are painted
on "boxes" that Davis has painstakingly constructed out of cut
and glued sheets of polyvinyl chloride, a type of hard plastic. They jut
1 to 3 inches from the wall, with beveled sides.
The painting surfaces are consistently flat, but because of the trompe
l'oeil effects that Davis achieves with intersecting planes of color,
some of the works appear to have raised or lowered sections.
Such an illusion can be seen in "Green Triangle Overlay," an
angled, four-sided piece, which is one of most striking works in the show.
Two similarly shaped, purple trapezoidal sections collide on the upper
left side in such a way that they seem be elevated a few inches from the
surface.
In nearly all these pieces, Davis employs unexpected and often jarring
combinations of bold colors, which have been so fastidiously applied with
a roller that the uniformly textured surfaces take on a machinelike perfection.
It is a visually engaging group of works that remind viewers why Davis
was once celebrated in the art world and why his day will likely come
again.
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