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 Æ produced
with the latest technology Æ 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