Geoffrey Davis at Andre Zarre and The:Artist:Network
Eduardo Costa
“Instead of doing a lot of paintings, I did a lot of paint on one painting” says Geoff Davis. He is talking about his own work, about 30
years of pigment accumulation on board, recently seen in New York City at The:Artist:Network and the Andr� Zarre Gallery, and in Brooklyn at Meru Art. Davis has been for many years working on his meticulous aggregations. The intensity of the practice has in his case inhibited his relationship with the public. If he wanted to show the work as he made it, too much energy had to go into finding an appropriate gallery, and it would became hard to keep the focus on the creative. As a result, Davis did not get to show the work for decades. Until recently, when he got several offers from galleries.
Davis’s paintings at Andr� Zarre were 10 oils on board where pigment raised up to 3 inches off the support. The thickness does not result in an even surface, rather a well worked field where undulations and other accidents occur in harmony. The tens of thousands of brushstrokes in each work grow unevenly toward the viewer, accounting for the valleys and hills of the finished surface.
Some of the paintings are abstract recollections of beautiful landscapes, people and animals Davis observed when he lived in Ethiopia as a child. These works, as well as several acrylics on paper in a separate room, are directly linked to Arthur Rimbaud’s own, much longer stay in that country. Rimbaud’s Ethiopian adventure of eight or ninel years ended when he got an infection which eventually led, already back in France, to an amputated leg and the loss of his life. Davis left Ethiopia with his family after two and a half years, and his memories of that time blended later on with his reading of the French poet’s biography. At The:Artist:Network the selection was elegantly bizarre, starring the original body of 16 white oils on board (16 x 12 inches each,) where the basic, off-white layer is built into coral like mazes of pigment. These are the oldest paintings the artist has worked on, inventing through the years his own, new space. Within these mazes, there are very few, discreet lines of dark red and other colors, running close to the canvas. The lines are like roads in a volumetric map, and they are barely visible depending on what angle you look from. Sometimes the white forms created by the aggregation approach geometry but mostly they resemble the scattered bones in a beautiful, miniaturized elephant cemetery.
Other paintings shown have a metaphysical and religious aspect as well as a painterly component which bring Alfred Jensen to mind. Some are organized following a geometric pattern of concentric rectangles, although the line and the thickness itself of the pigment are heavily organic. Some motifs are representational and others abstract. Square motifs can be almost flat or grow to become almost cubes. Jensen had an intensely firm commitment to art, an obsessional, meditational approach which Davis has incorporated.
In one of this works, Hunger Strike, the political theme is fundamental. A reverberation of skulls, larger in the perimeter of the work, smaller as they approach the center, commemorate the 1981 hunger strike where Bobby Sands and other political prisoners who claimed political status for Ireland were left to die during the times of the infamous British prime minister Margaret Thatcher. This work and others in this group, include things like glass fragments, cigarette butts, jewels, and gold leaf areas. A third group at The:Artist:Network shows Albert P. Ryder’s influence.
Describing some forms by Ryder, Carter Ratcliff has noted that they “ loom through a dusk that feels like melancholy made visible”. Melancholy is also made visible at times in Davis’s paintings. There are romantic scenes as wel. In one lovely painting, a couple is shown as thick, barely descriptive brushstrokes in a pretty expressionistic landscape. Medium here converses well with subject matter, as the sensual colors and brushstrokes representing the couple gravitate toward each other like lovers. There were also odd works, like a radio and a vase covered by many layers of acrylic paint, and a unique construction with chicken wire which was a memorial to Davis’s pet chicken. Also a sculpture was shown, about 25 feet of string tightly holding together pencil stubs that Davis used through the years.
“Invent your own mythology or be enslaved by someone else’s” is a William Blake quote the artist likes. The phrase recommends the individual as the point of departure in the search for liberating, creative work. The world is too full of culture, innumerable uninteresting objects and invalid philosophies. Knowledge has to change, we should reinvent it periodically. Davis is doing his own reinvention, and although we see him evolve from several traditions of contemporary painting, his path is original and promising.
