Ronald Davis: The Essence Of Abstraction

by Ronnie Landfield

 

The best abstract painting made in America during the past thirty-five years has been eclipsed. Great American abstract painting hasn't been replaced by anything comparable, and I'm using the word eclipse here because eclipses pass. Fanfare and fluff tend to obscure what has always been: that great art gets overlooked by mediocrity, pretense and market strategies, and today is no exception.

We all pay the price and suffer the vagaries of money and fashion in an art world with little or no taste and seemingly little regard for quality. Without belaboring the point too much, the greatest, most universal, timeless, original, genuine and important works made by American abstract painters now in their fifties and sixties are by and large suppressed from text-books, academia, art magazines and museum stages across the world. With very few exceptions, many important American abstract painters have fallen into obscurity and some have fallen by the wayside. None-the less, and to our benefit, there are dozens of great American abstract painters who, though sometimes disillusioned and suppressed, have still continued to produce their work, and Ronald Davis – who's had his share of the limelight – is one of the best.

I’ve known Ron Davis and his work for nearly forty years. I first encountered his paintings in 1964 when I was an art student at The San Fran-cisco Art Institute. Ron had recently left the Art Institute, and I’d hear about these guys who were painting hard-edge paintings in a roller rink. I was painting hard-edge paintings too and my name is Ronnie so I looked at his work, which I saw at the Art Institute. Clearly his paintings were among the best student paintings I’d seen and I’d been looking at student work all over the country at that point. Over the years we've become friends and we've talked for countless hours about art and life. Ron is a generous soul, he is tough-minded about his art, he has had his share of grief and struggle, he's raised a family the best he could, and he's fought many internal battles with himself. He is a spiritual man, as I think most important painters are, even if they don't let on.

When I visited Davis's studio in downtown Los Angeles in January 1969 and saw his new resin paintings for the first time, I was thunderstruck. It can be argued that between 1966 and 1972 Davis produced one of the most remarkable bodies of work ever created by an artist on these shores. Certainly the Dodecagons from 1968-69 remain among the most visually stunning, audacious and intellectually interesting bodies of work made by an abstract painter in the last half of the twentieth century.

Davis, born in California and raised in Wyoming, was inspired by Wyoming-born Jackson Pollock and, against all kinds of logic, remains perhaps the only American painter who has successfully used Pollock's drip and splatter technique with fruition. His virtuoso paint handling in the resin paintings created a new kind of geometric expressionism, keeping an un-spoken promise made to Abstract Expressionism years before.

Ronald Davis refers to his work as Abstract Illusionism. With the Dodecagons, Davis created plastic paintings that were optical illusions of shapes in three dimensions, under a flat shiny surface on a twelve-angled object to be seen on the wall. They essentially broke all the rules of modernist rhetoric while being brilliant modernist paintings, there-by expanding the definition of modernism. It’s difficult to remember just how innovative and radical these paintings were when they were made. The paintings of 1968-1969 were daring in so many ways. Davis took risks with his perspective drawing, color, use of transparency, his paint handling, his materials, his shapes, his style, and his use of illusion. He essentially painted his resin paintings backwards, face down, unseen, under the picture plane. They are utterly original and brilliantly conceived. Besides masterpieces like Zodiac, Double Ring Roto, Spoke and Double Ring, an early Dodecagon I find particularly interesting is Spindle. Spindle, 1968, with a deceptively simple geometric format, breaks new ground with its clear painterly forms, mysterious depths of field (nearly dispensing with perspective and illusion), reading flatter than most of Davis's paintings. In Spindle the hard reflective surface toughens the picture and gives strength to its lyricism. Ronald Davis refers to his work as Abstract Illusionism. With the Dodecagons, Davis created plastic paintings that were optical illusions of shapes in three dimensions, under a flat shiny surface on a twelve-angled object to be seen on the wall. They essentially broke all the rules of modernist rhetoric while being brilliant modernist paintings, there-by expanding the definition of modernism. It’s difficult to remember just how innovative and radical these paintings were when they were made. The paintings of 1968-1969 were daring in so many ways. Davis took risks with his perspective drawing, color, use of transparency, his paint handling, his materials, his shapes, his style, and his use of illusion. He essentially painted his resin paintings backwards, face down, unseen, under the picture plane. They are utterly original and brilliantly conceived.

Besides masterpieces like Zodiac, Double Ring Roto, Spoke and Double Ring, an early Dodecagon I find particularly interesting is Spindle. Spindle, 1968, with a deceptively simple geometric format, breaks new ground with its clear painterly forms, mysterious depths of field (nearly dispensing with perspective and illusion), reading flatter than most of Davis's paintings. In Spindle the hard reflective surface toughens the picture and gives strength to its lyricism.