#noah davis
In his short career, Noah Davis breathed new life into painting. With imagery derived from a mix of photographs, mass culture, and his own imagination, Davis’ canvases are as haunting as they are magical. He captured domestic interiors and suburban landscapes with equal ease—settings in which figures and our relationship with them oscillate between intimacy and alienation. It is hard to put his visual poetry into words, but I’d argue that it is precisely his manipulation of his chosen medium that is his greatest and most expressive achievement. Through his inventive handling of oil paint on canvas, Davis was able to collapse divergent modes of seeing and representing. If we read his work as environmental portraiture, then Davis shows us how our bodies and identities are not ontologically distinct from our surroundings, but rather constituted by and thus inseparable from them. If we read his work as impressionistic snapshots of place or memory, then Davis gives us a visual allegory for how processes of remembering take place—layers build upon and obscure the ones beneath, events blur into each other and refuse to cohere, logic fades while emotion holds firm, and people and our mental images of them melt, blur, and bleed into each other. Davis achieves this epistemological dynamism entirely through his manipulation of painting itself, embracing seemingly contradictory modes of realism, expressionism, and impressionism within the same canvas and coaxing them into cooperation. By centering African American subjects, he calls our attention to the particular urgency of a project of black representation that allows for difficulty and irresolution rather than essentialist identification.
Noah Davis, Untitled, 2015
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One of the most upsetting things about media culture today is that we often wait until people die to honor them and discuss the significance of their work. It’s a double-edged sword, though, in that these moments sometimes bring an artist’s work a degree of instant attention it might otherwise achieve more gradually, perhaps never at such a concentrated level. Such is, arguably, the case with Noah Davis, whose work I only learned of when he died in 2015 at the age of 32. His moody, intimate, surrealistic paintings make you feel feelings you can’t quite identify. Davis was a genius at manipulating paint on the canvas, balancing delicate washes suffused with light against dark, moody figures that often appear to melt into each other or their surroundings. I see a bit of the South African painter Marlene Dumas in his work, but rather than portraits Davis’s paintings serve as eerie evocations of environment, wherein people and place, figure and ground blur and bleed. The worlds he creates are at once alluring and frightening, as in this depiction here of some sort of march toward death. I think Davis was rightly critical of how he was almost exclusively discussed in conversations about other African-American artists. “But it’s the most glamorous box I’ve ever been in, so whatever,” he once said. It’s a tragedy we won’t get any more paintings from him, but Davis left a significant body of work behind that there’s still a lot to say about, not to mention his many curatorial projects that will live on at The Underground Museum, an exhibition space and community hub he founded in LA.
Noah Davis, The Seven Prisoners of the Abyss, 2008
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