IN THE MIDDLE OF THINGS

Painter Noah Davis’ posthumous show at David Zwirner in Chelsea is drawing attention and crowds, deservedly. The canvases are substantial in size and subject, and the installation fills the two main galleries richly. I visited on a Saturday afternoon, when a bright mix of artists, collectors, fans and hipsters gathered in front of different works in contemplation and admiration.

Davis’ style is distinctive; he uses a palette of spoiled pastels and dulled greys, skimming fine lines over darker backgrounds. The paintings are strongly graphic and also strangely muted, pictorially flattened. His subject matter and format vary radically. The most-publicized works in the show are intimate family scenes, rendered in a loose hand that confers mystery and privacy. There are several other scenes in which staid bourgeois figures are rendered in surreal settings: a ballet troupe performing on a suburban lawn, a man in a suit crossing a desert, a family in Sunday finery at a summer barbecue. And there are fascinating one-offs: a moonlit cityscape of Los Angeles, the portrait of a man enmeshed in a painted grid, and the highly mannered view of a man and a deer confronting one another, in silhouette, on a mountaintop. What holds all together is Davis’ sense of composition, which is supreme. However strange or cluttered the scene, the images remains cool, balanced.

Davis died in 2015 when he was thirty-four. What’s here is the work of a young painter trying his hand and everything, moving freely and whole-heartedly between different genres (portrait, collage, graphics), narrative modes (biography, fantasy, myth), and manners (figuration and abstraction). And this is what is saddest, that he is right in the middle things.

Noah Davis, “The Last Barbeque,” 2008. Collection of Sam and Shanit Schwartz © The Estate of Noah Davis. Courtesy The Estate of Noah Davis.

March 30, 2020 by Nalina Moses

STORMY WEATHER

The movie Mr. Turner gives us the person of J.M.W. Turner, not the painter, and that’s unfortunate. Because, as depicted here by Timothy Spall, he’s a cantankerous middle-aged coot with a crab-like shuffle who communicates, when he cares to, in caveman growls. He neglects his adult daughters, sexually exploits his maid, bullies potential patrons, and insults fellow painters. Maybe the warts-and-all portrait is meant to show that beautiful things are often created by unbeautiful people. But, except for the tenderness he shows his father and his mistress, we see little more than the warts.

More confusingly, we don’t see the things that make Turner a great painter: vision, discipline and passion. I can’t believe that the doltish half-man in this film could have painted the way Turner did. In the movie we see Turner stabbing the canvas with brushes, scrubbing paint off it with rags, spitting into its surface, smoothing patches with his fingers, and blowing pigment across it from the palm of his hand. But we don’t ever see him paint. That is, we don’t ever see him look deeply into the world around him and then into to the one he’s making. Instead we see him hop out of bed each morning, march into his studio, and make paintings. (Compare this to Lust for Life, which shows us how uniquely Van Gogh sees the world, and how he puts that world into his work.)

The paintings used as props in the movie are poor reproductions; most don’t look like paintings at all. But they give glimpses of the power of Turner’s art. In a scene set at the Royal Academy we see a young, petulant Queen Victoria belittle Sunrise with Sea Monsters to Prince Albert as “an oily yellow stain." That painting, hung high on the gallery wall, hemmed in by dutifully observed landscapes and hokey pre-Raphaelite melodramas, jumps out at us. It’s a fiery, emotional utterance, an explosion of light, a composition perched audaciously between the abstract and the figural; it’s like a scream.

March 08, 2015 by Nalina Moses