When the illusion is lost, the art is hard to find . . .1
by Ronald Davis
This
statement was originally printed in the "one-sheet" accompanying
the exhibition Ronald
Davis: Recent Abstractions, 2001 – 2002, published by
School of Art and History, Denver University, The Victoria H. Myhren
Gallery, in Sept. 2002. It
was also reprinted in the catalog accompanying the exhibition Ronald
Davis: Forty Years of Abstraction, The Butler Institute of American
Art, Youngstown, Ohio.
The
recent paintings included in this exhibition were created between October
1, 2001 and August 2002. They are Modern, coming at the twilight of
the Modern Era, or perhaps forty or fifty years after the actual ending
of the Modern Era which began with the European Renaissance around
the year 1500 and ended in the 1950’s at the time I was embarking
on my calling. Enlightenment has ended. “Post-Modenism?” I
don’t think so. Historian John Lukacs refers to the “P-M” term
as. “this belated, confused and inaccurate designation.” 2
I
suggest that these works are seeking a new visual epistemology that is
serious, moral, and spiritual, deviating from the self-indulgent, ironic,
post-modern, and politically correct painting and non-painting (remember,
painting is dead) or scumbling of recent years, and place them in the
tradition of the excellent abstract works of Abstract Expressionism (Pollock,
Still, Newman, and Morris Lewis to name a few of the greats that continue
to inspire me.) Constitutionally, I remain a geometrician and an expressionist.
These
recent painting mark a departure from the major structural element (trademark)
that I have pursued in the majority of my work over the past thirty-nine
years; that being theoretical three point vanishing point perspective
illusions. In those works, I primarily employed three construction methods
to draw or shape my paintings. 1) In the early years I relied on traditional
drafting illustration methods to create drawings of depicted 3-D objects
that were then cartooned up to the final scale of the painting. I should
note that these depicted objects retained my commitment to abstraction;
for me, a slab is just as abstract as a square. 2) In the seventies and
eighties I drew my perspective grids full scale using snap lines, placing
the vanishing points 40 to 60 feet apart. 3) Beginning in the early eighties,
I increasingly relied on 3-D computer programs such as Renderman, Form
Z, or Cinema 4-D to sketch out the shapes and shadows, then projected
them up in scale onto the painting. These methods served me well in solving
the fundamental problem of painting: “What color and where to put
it?” But the temporal gap between concept and preparation and execution
of a work led me to a studio crises. What I needed to do was reinvent
a do-able concept of the “blank canvas.” I was compelled
to discard my primary preoccupation of the last 39 years (the perspective
grid) and seek a more direct means of visualization. This exhibition
thus includes a watershed moment in my career: a going backward in order
to move forward.
These
recent abstractions evolve from crude pencil sketches, eschewing traditional
perspective illusion and are drawn with the eye and the saw. Illusion
remains, but these paintings are more optical and elusive – and
given looking time move around a lot in subtle, ambiguous, and mysterious
ways. They require greater focus. They are hard to do.
Note
should be made of the reductive, Hard Edge nature of these abstractions.
Over the years I have oscillated between the Hard Edge and the painterly.
I do both loose and precise with facility. However in these complicated
times a need for clarity seems paramount. I have found that color contrast
and interaction trumps drips, splatters, scumbles, and brush-work and
other non-art content sludge as the means to true expression of the soul
and intellect. Indeed, the chary binding of these bipolar opposites are
at those extremes where opposites simultaneously meet and transcend sign
making. Unknown archetypes of heart, head and crotch are discovered and
revealed.
— Ronald Davis, July 2002
1 Anon. quote from a drawing.
2 Lukacs, John, At the End of an Age, Yale University Press, New Haven
When the illusion is lost, the art is hard to find . . .1
by Ronald Davis