Dennis Hopper’s presence in Taos in the 1960s was, in large part, the beginning of a third wave of internationally recognized artists following in the footsteps of the historic Taos Founders and Taos Moderns. In HOPPER CURATES, Dennis Hopper has selected from a portion of the Los Angeles artists who have made Taos, New Mexico their home.

These artists first came together in the early 1960’s, during a time when the number of serious artists in Los Angeles was minimal. They lived in the same neighborhoods, frequented the same haunts and knew each other based on their chosen profession as artists. Dennis Hopper frequented the galleries where these artists were shown. He was an important part of the energy being created in Los Angeles during that time. His collection grew and included many early pieces from Bell, Price, Cooper and Davis. At the time, Ace Gallery and Nicholas Wilder Gallery supported the work of Ron Cooper, Larry Bell and Ron Davis.

Bell, Cooper, Davis and Price were also well respected and exhibiting internationally. The Ferus Gallery, which opened in 1957, represented Larry Bell and Ken Price. The Ferus Gallery soon became a cultural hub with shows dedicated to other local talents like Ed Ruscha, Robert Irwin, Ed Moses, Wallace Berman, Billy Allen Bengston and Ed Kienholz.

The true epicenter, though, was Barneys Beanery. According to Ron Cooper, it was the first place he had a bar tab. It was an artist and writer’s bar with a great assortment of whisky and beer. “It was fabulous. It was just a great place to hang out and very conducive to talk! It was a place where a man could go and have a drink and talk to another guy. And then the girls started coming too, which was kinda cool” A slow migration, beginning with Dennis Hopper, began to find its way to Taos, New Mexico. Ron Cooper made a home in Truchas in 1969 and later moved to Taos. Larry Bell arrived with his family in the early 70’s followed by Ken Price and his family. In 1991, Ron Davis made Taos New Mexico his home. Robert Dean Stockwell arrived in 2004. These West Coast artists, who had already achieved international recognition, saw Taos as a private place, where they would be left alone to raise their families and practice their craft. A community of West Coast artists began and grew.

Ronald Davis: All the Presidents’ Rooms

October 17-November 15
Artist’s Reception: Friday, October 17, 5:30-7:30 p.m.

SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO — Eight Modern is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibition, Ronald Davis: All the Presidents’ Rooms.

Legendary abstract artist Ronald Davis has produced a comprehensive series of digital compositions, one for each American president, as well as current candidates John McCain and Barack Obama. Davis recasts portraits of each president as decorative elements in a wondrously diverse assortment of “rooms.”

Whether it’s a thumbnail image of Lyndon Johnson dwarfed by a bolt and a nut, or Andrew Jackson’s visage staring back at the viewer from the end of a skewed hallway, Davis’ surreal imagery offers unexpected, utterly original views of an American institution.

“History tries to lock things into time and space, but I can put James Buchanan into a tract house or [Ulysses] Grant at the bottom of a swimming pool,” Davis says. “…It’s not to show them as good or bad, it’s just about what happened on the journey.”

Similar to Andy Warhol’s explanatory statement, “I like soup,” Davis’ series of presidents’ rooms began because, as the artist says, “I like Truman.” Davis’ father took him to see HarryTruman speak in Cheyenne, Wyoming in 1948, so in the mid-1990s, when Davis was looking for a two-dimensional image to place onto the “wall” of a virtual room he was creating, he chose a clip-art portrait of Truman – leading to his first president’s room.

Davis picked up the project again in 2004. Energized by the upcoming election, he says he undertook “the somewhat obsessive goal to do all 44 (presidents), because once I had the first five in front of me, I felt they all deserved the same treatment.”

Davis models and renders his computer graphic images using high-end 3D software, then transmits them to ImageWizards, where the “pixel dust” is heat-fused onto sheets of aluminum.

Davis burst onto the international art scene in the 1960s, aggressively and vividly using isometric and multi-point perspective to offer an illusion of depth while maintaining the idea of painting-as-object for which post Abstract-Expressionist painting was known. Davis now lives on the Hondo Mesa north of Taos and has successfully explored a wide array of mediums in his career. His work has been shown in over 65 solo exhibitions and countless group shows and resides in public collections including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Guggenheim Museum, LACMA, the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Monday, October 29, 2007

3D/CG: Ronald Davis
Three-Dimensional Computer Graphics, 2004-2007

November 16 – December 31

Artist’s Reception: Friday, November 16, 5:30 – 7:30pm

SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO—Eight Modern is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibition, 3D/CG: Ronald Davis. True to its name, this solo show focuses on three-dimensional computer graphics on aluminum and paper produced by Davis from 2004 to 2007.

Davis burst onto the international art scene in the 1960s and was one of the first California abstract artists of that era hailed by East Coast intelligentsia for the way his vivid, abstract art broke new ground in perspective and materials.

Davis turned a decades-long adherence to the two-dimensionality of abstract painting on its ear, using isometric and multi-point perspective to offer an illusion of depth while maintaining the idea of painting-as-object for which post Abstract-Expressionist painting was known. Davis has described his works as “painting as the illusion of an object.”

As the years passed and the artist has changed, so too has his art – but not his relevance or his willingness to pioneer new methods. Davis has always embraced the use of new technologies and materials to achieve previously impossible methods of artistic expression. And while his images in 3D/CG are indeed computer-generated, the touch and expertise of a veteran artist are omnipresent.

In his catalogue essay for 3D/CG, art critic Tom Collins describes Davis’s newest work and his process. “For the past couple of years Davis has been rendering images — mostly geometric abstractions, a coffee cup, strange “spaces,” portraits of U.S. presidents as framed portraits in a gallery room setting — on his computer screen using a high-end three-dimensional program…The resulting image-objects are confusing, subversive, paradoxical.”

Born in California but raised in Wyoming, Davis’s first ambition was to be a race car driver. That soon proved too dangerous and too costly, so Davis headed to the San Francisco Art Institute, where he studied 1960-64.

Within a year, Davis had his first one-man show, and before the decade was out, he’d ascended to the heights of the contemporary art world. In the decades that followed, popular success retreated, but his creativity never waned. Davis continued to explore formal abstraction and perspective illusion through a variety of media and styles, including splatter painting, encaustic, painted PVC reliefs and computer imaging.

In 1990, Davis purchased a 10-acre compound on the Hondo Mesa north of Taos. Three years later, he sold his Frank Gehry-designed studio in Malibu and relocated to New Mexico, where he has resided ever since.

And, in this decade, Davis’s striking new work and inclusion in a series of retrospective exhibitions at institutions like LACMA, the Denver Art Museum, the Norton Simon Museum and others have once again brought him back to the forefront of the art world.

Ronald Davis’s art has appeared in over 65 solo exhibitions and countless major group exhibitions. His works are in numerous private and public collections, including the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Art Institute of Chicago, Corcoran Gallery of Modern Art, Denver Art Museum, Guggenheim Museum, Harwood Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, Museum of Modern Art, Tate Modern and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

If New York is a magnet for artists who want to become famous, Taos is a magnet for a different breed of artists — those who care far more about making art than about promoting it, said David L. Witt, curator of the Harwood Museum of Art in Taos. Even though it is difficult to impossible to launch a national reputation from a small village in northern New Mexico, many artists moved there, for various reasons. Some worked in abstract styles long before there was any market for their work in Taos. In retrospective, the artists seem either idealistic or naive.

“I know scores of artists who came here, and they all had some belief in the significance of the work they were doing,” Witt said by phone from Taos. “They have totally fallen in love with the land itself and all of its aspects. I’m one of them; I stayed and worked with people I believed in instead of climbing the career ladder.”

Many of the artists who moved to Taos kept a low profile, Witt said. “There are a number of people who are known, but only up to a point. They came here mostly to work, so their public persona is limited.”

Two exhibits currently showing at the Harwood give a glimpse into the lives of a couple of those artists: Ronald Davis and Leslie Crespin. Witt, who has been curator at the Harwood for more than 25 years, has spent decades studying and writing about the Modernists who worked in northern New Mexico.

Ronald Davis built a successful career making geometric abstract paintings. His work is included in the collections of the Corcoran Museum of Art in Washington, D.C.; the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York City; the Tate Gallery in London; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and other public collections.

“He is known for his geometric stuff and for art that defines space in quite amazing ways,” Witt said. “His ability at arranging things in relation to each other is phenomenal. But what we are showing is something that he’s not known for.”

Davis’ The Music Series 1983-1985 will come as a shock to people only familiar with the artist’s geometric paintings. The series is named after electronic music Davis composed while he was working on the paintings. “The music and painting were starting to influence each other,” Witt explained. “I haven’t heard the music. Maybe it’s as wild as the paintings.”

Artists at the heights of their careers do not usually start painting in a style borrowed from an icon of modern art, yet The Music Series openly borrows from Jackson Pollock. Davis said that in the early ’80s he felt that the foundation of modern painting was being ignored by the art world. “Pollock was so important that you have to think about him, but these guys weren’t,” Davis said by phone from his Arroyo Hondo studio. “It became urgent for me — nobody knows about Pollock anymore. It was up to me to rescue painting. It was a grandiose plan.”

Davis had studied Pollock’s work years before as an art student, but during the ’80s he reimmersed himself in Pollock, studying the paintings with the eye of a mature artist. At that time, Davis said, most people thought Pollock was washed up when he died, that he had painted himself into a corner and didn’t know what to do next. But Davis never believed that. He believed that an artist of Pollock’s genius would have found new and unexpected ways to redefine painting.

For two years, Davis poured and dripped acrylic paint made for animators onto canvas and paper. He worked in brilliant colors, often adding liquid mediums to make some layers translucent. He used metallic paints and pearlescent pigments to make other layers reflect light in unexpected ways. He poured matte paint next to glossy paint. There are about 200 works in The Music Series — 80 on canvas, the others on paper.

“What’s special about The Music Series is a kind of illusionistic space — even though they are organic,” Davis explained. “As many ways as there are to put paint on with a brush, there are probably even more ways to pour paint.”

BlumHelman Gallery in New York gave Davis a one-man show of The Music Series in 1984. Davis said he had grown accustomed to having his shows sell out and having his work reviewed in Artforum and Art in America. The reception The Music Series received shocked him.

“We were standing at 57th Street and Madison Avenue, getting ready to go to the opening, and Joe Helman said, ‘These are beautiful paintings, but they’re not in vogue.'” Few paintings sold, and the gallery shipped the others back to Davis right after the show closed. There were no reviews or notices.

The New York ’80s art scene was a roller-coaster ride for many artists, Davis included. But the silence Davis experienced after showing The Music Series left him shaken. He said he would have preferred a review calling the paintings stupid and derivative — any reaction would have been better than no reaction.

Today, Davis does not have a gallery, although he said he is negotiating with one and expects to be showing his work soon. He talks openly and without bitterness about his career, the art world, and the Malibu studio he used to own, which was designed by Frank Gehry. And, he’s excited that some of The Music Series is on display at the Harwood Museum.

“I was making a statement about the art of painting,” he added. “I always loved them [The Music Series], but the critics, the galleries, and the collectors were looking someplace else.”

On a recent episode of Antiques Roadshow, a man recalled vivid boyhood memories of staring at a landscape painting in his parents’ home. As a boy, he said, sometimes he felt that he was walking on the dirt road depicted in the painting. The Roadshow art expert told him the painting was worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Another kind of art expert might have said that the artist had placed that road exactly where he did to cause those with the imagination to feel as if they could step into the painting. She might also have explained that illusionism – techniques that cause two dimensions to be perceived as three – was at the heart of Western painting for centuries.

Illusionism’s importance waned during the first half of the 20th century after modernist masters like Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg experimented with abstraction. By the early 1960s, when Ronald Davis left Cheyenne, Wyoming, to study at the San Francisco Art Institute, that school no longer taught young artists how to create illusionistic space. The Abstract Expressionist painter Clyfford Still taught at the institute during the 1940s, Davis explained during a recent interview. All of Davis’ instructors, except Richard Diebenkorn, had been heavily influenced by Still. Diebenkorn would later become the most famous West Coast abstractionist, but when Davis was a student Diebenkorn still painted people and landscapes.

In spite of long talks with Diebenkorn, Davis was enthralled with abstraction. He remembers staying late at the institute’s library reading articles by art theorists like Clement Greenberg, who had praised the Abstract Expressionists’ total rejection of three-dimensional illusions. “The buzz at that time was Frank Stella’s idea of making paintings that were objects in real space,” Davis said. “And, I thought, if Stella is doing painting as object, can I do an illusion of an object? Can I do what painters have always done through the centuries?”

Although Davis is often identified as a California artist, he says that he was deeply influenced by the heady art theories spilling out of New York during the middle of the 20th century. Yet he found himself rejecting the era’s most radical art tenet – that a paintings flat surface should not be violated by illusion. Davis taught himself to draw geometric shapes using two-point perspective.

Davis has never made paintings that would cause a little boy to daydream about entering the canvas to walk down a dirt road; for more than 50 years he has painted rectangles, cubes, cylinders, arches and 12-sided polygons. Davis often works in alternative media like fiberglass, polyester resin, and most recently, ink-dye transfer on aluminum.

On Friday, Nov. 16, Eight Modern opens 3D/CG: Ronald Davis, Three-Dimensional Computer Graphics, 2004-2007. The familiar geometric shapes generations of artists have used to construct illusions of trees, faces, and cityscapes are all here. In some of Davis’ works, like Three Rounds Four, cones and spheres have the classical purity of those painted by the 15th-century artist Paolo Uccello. But in other works like Two Rounds, Brushed, cylinders twist and bend as if they have attained the powers of Plastic Man.

Much like garish artificial flowers, Davis’ illusionistic shapes are in-your-face fake. Printed Puck is lavender with purple dots that appear to stretch as if being sucked into another dimension. “It’s virtual; it’s not artificial,” Davis said about these new works. “All these things could exist somehow as sculpture, but they might have to be made out of cellophane or some exotic material.”

Davis created all the images in 3D/CG on computers. He often cites their media as “pixel dust” on aluminum, but they are dye-transfer prints made on the same machines that print wood grain onto Formica.

Davis drew his earliest geometric shapes freehand, but by the 1970s he was experimenting with computer graphics. Through a program at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, he was able to work on an IBM mainframe. Always in love with technology and new materials, Davis said he has learned several computer languages to keep up with ever increasing computer-graphic capabilities. The precision possible with the three-dimensional programs and Davis’ pixel-dust printing techniques gives works like those in his Upright Dodecagon series a cool perfection that he calls transcendental escapism. “The world is kind of crazy,” he noted. But in a work like Upright Dodecagon, he added, “there’s a clarity that you can’t experience in the clutter of the world.”

Davis occasionally makes work that seem to fly in the face of the serene purity of Upright Dodecagon. In a series he calls Presidents’ Rooms, he has “hung” clip-art portraits of American presidents in virtual rooms. Harry Truman Room Six is the only image from the series included in 3D/CG. “When I was 11 years old, my dad took me down to the Union Station in Cheyenne, Wyoming, and I saw Harry Truman on his cross-country campaign. I still remember being on my father’s shoulders.” Truman Room Six, Davis added, “is about honoring Truman, but it’s also just an abstraction. Andy Warhol was asked why he was doing a Campbell’s soup can. He said he liked soup. Well, I like Truman.”

When talking to Davis about his art, it becomes clear that, though many of his images seem cold and have been generated on a computer, they are informed by thousands of life experiences: a young man’s long talks with his art teacher, the feel of his father’s shoulders as they provided a perch from which to glimpse a president, and late nights spent in a library.

Yet Davis says that he also wants art to be more than the accumulation of all those experiences. “To experience a Rothko is to experience another world,” he added. “That’s what art does. It’s totally meaningful and spiritual, or it’s totally meaningless.” And when he looks at his own art, Davis added, he sometimes doesn’t know whether it’s meaningful or meaningless. “Maybe that’s the good thing about it.

“I remember being in Hollywood and talking to a woman who had a Ph.D. in comparative literature, and she asked, ‘Just what does that painting mean?’ And I said, ‘I don’t know what it means. I just know how to make it. If I knew what it meant, I wouldn’t have to make it. It wouldn’t be interesting.”

Renowned contemporary artist Ronald Davis’ three-dimensional computer graphics on aluminum and paper, opening today at Eight Modern, make technology the maidservant to art in a way seldom if ever seen in Santa Fe.

While Davis’ images in the new show, “3DCG,” are computer-generated, the touch and expertise of a veteran artist are obvious. He created the pieces exhibited in a high-end modeling and rendering software that allowed him complete control over how the images are shaped, colored, textured and lighted. A master printer then heat- fused the images onto aluminum. The result is images that would otherwise be impossible to obtain.

Davis himself doesn’t really see what all the fuss is about. “I’ve been doing this for 25 years, since the early ’80s,” he told the Journal from his home studio north of Taos. “And I’ve had a history of playing with perspective since I began doing art professionally, in the early ’60s. I taught myself the old way, beginning with isometrics and progressing to one-point, two-point and then three-point perspective.”

Born in California but raised in Wyoming, Davis first planned to become a racecar driver. When that didn’t work out, he studied at the San Francisco Art Institute, and in the mid-’60s had his first one-man show.

His work, in fact, turned a decades-long adherence to the two-dimensionality of abstract painting on its ear. He became famous among California artists of the time as a post-abstract-expressionist who was breaking new ground. Davis called his works “painting as the illusion of an object.”

In about 1970, Davis said, he was matched with a technology company, CalCom, for an “Art and Technology Show” at the Los Angeles County Museum.

“The company rep’s first question was ‘Do you know Fortran?’ (a computer language). I said, ‘What’s that?'” Davis recalled.

“It wasn’t a good match. We didn’t produce any art for the show,” he added. But the artist’s curiosity was piqued. He’s essentially been playing with technological advances ever since. “In 1976-78, I got interested in electronic music, so I bought one of the first Apples. I began doing 3D drawings. In 1982, I did paintings with that perspective,” Davis said, adding that his first computer-aided graphics involved printouts that he then reproduced in paint.

Davis spent the first 25 years of his career in Los Angeles, but he moved to what had been his getaway on the Hondo Mesa in ’91, sparking rumors in the art world that he’d “gone into seclusion.” He wasn’t secluded – he loves the Taos area – but working, continuing to explore formal abstraction and perspective illusion through a variety of media and styles, including splatter painting, encaustic, painted PVC reliefs and computer imaging.

“I’m much happier here,” he said. “I’m sure if I’d stayed in LA, my recognition might have been stronger, but I have good galleries, and I sell enough in Houston and San Francisco and LA to get along.”

His work has appeared in more than 65 solo exhibitions and countless major group exhibitions. It hangs in numerous private and public collections, including the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Art Institute of Chicago, Corcoran Gallery of Modern Art, Denver Art Museum, Guggenheim Museum, Harwood Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, Museum of Modern Art, Tate Modern and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

In this decade, his striking new work and a series of retrospective exhibitions have brought him back to the forefront of the art world, yet this show in Santa Fe excited him more than others.

I knew (Eight Modern director) Jaquelin Loyd when she had a little gallery in Taos, and showed my work when I wasn’t showing elsewhere. She’s a great friend, and Eight Modern is a nice space,” he said. “I’m really looking forward to this show.”

Ron Davis, now that he can in no way be regarded as entertaining a West Coast obsession for the simply seductive in surfaces (certain aspects of his work in the past having prompted this concern), and now that his irregular shapes are seasoned by time and never look just radical (those striving for mere radicalism having outdistanced him in this respect), shows himself, in his current show, and the indisputably important painter he is. His eight new works in polyester resin on fiberglass (now thin as decals and literally pasted to the walls) are a significant advance in his investigation of flatness and illusionism. Collectively, they impress through Davis’s inventiveness in utilizing themes from recent art without being at all hackneyed, as in, for example, the lozenge-shaped Five Band Box, which derives from Noland, and the two rectilinear-directed pictures, Four Block Box and Stalls, which make reference to Minimalism. What at first looks slightly banal in its first perceived obviousness supports continued looking to the advantage of the work.

The aspect of reference might seem a side issue, but is in fact crucial since the use of illusionism is ever linked with the possibility that these objects may not be properly paintings but simply illustrations of something else – of the boxes, fan, folded hands, and so on which are their “subjects.” It is the beauty of Davis’s work that he is able to avoid this and that what we see here is far more convincing than what the “subjects” would be in three dimensions. For example, Davis uses the subjects (or objects) of Minimalism, but surpasses them because there is just so much more here than a presentation of geometry. Rather, this geometry operates not only in terms of its stark simplicity (the simpler works are the better) but offers also the visual pleasures of carefully determined and modulated flat surfaces. Put like this it might appear that a confusion of genres is involved, but this is not really the case. Like all major art this is about the resolution of paradox, which is something very different. Like Olitski, but of course in a dissimilar manner, Davis creates flat surfaces where logically one would think they could not possibly exist.

His work is weakest, however, and the surface treatment insufficient to achieve flatness, precisely when the chosen format allows reference to gain the upper hand. While the nature of this work is bound to be referential, problems ensue if that reference becomes specific. Davis still has a lot of the West Coast in his taste and can sometimes lapse into the almost-nostalgic, as in Center Notch, the least successful painting in the show. Here, the reference is not only to the geometry, but the geometry in turn is referential, in this case to something like the floor plan for a twenties moderne interior. This is not, however, an insistence that what may be called regional taste is necessarily impure, rather that the essential thing (as Greenberg said of Caro) is the placing of it. As for Caro and his “Englishness,” were Davis’s taste anything but West Coast taste, “given the concrete physical contexts in which he makes it operate, the results would be freakish.” To my mind, Center Notch does have something of the freakish about it, as does another work, Center Hole, consisting of two lozenge slabs superimposed to leave as negative spaces on their horizontal extremities two rather niggly triangles of wall space. But these two works are exceptional in this respect, and while one can find worrying details in some of the other paintings (Davis’s fondness for off-beat colors occasionally letting in some unfortunate hues, like the top orange in Plane Sawtooth; and sometimes the negative shapes seem a trifle unconsidered), the whole show is impressive. And particularly so are the two paintings, Stalls and Sawtooth.

The strength of Davis’s blatantly illusionistic formats has been that they seem so naturally to dictate the existence of a painting’s design. Everything that is there is there because it must be there. There simply don’t seem to be problems like worrying whether this shape should be a bit larger or smaller or whether the edge should be shortened or extended. At least that is the impression the best work gives, a kind of inevitable rightness. Of course problems of adjustment are involved, but one doesn’t notice them at first. It is only after a while that you notice, say, that the “vertical” planes of Sawtooth aren’t all vertical but begin gradually to slant toward the left-hand side of the picture, thus allowing the image a certain relaxed flexibility and preventing a too boxed-in look. But this ease doesn’t look striven for, and this is what is important. Again, the naturalness with which the illusionistic format creates both internal divisions and literal shapes could be a drawback in stressing too overtly the tendency toward illustration. But by making the pictures semi-transparent and hence revealing the dark “back” shapes of the subjects, Davis stresses the artificiality of the situation he is involved with. If these “back” shapes in Sawtooth hadn’t been visible enough to create an image of overlapping lozenges which coexists with that of the folded band, the painting would be simply illustrative. And if the juxtaposition of colors, of varying blues, greens and reds in the center three “flaps” of this work hadn’t so precisely affirmed their interdependency, its literal shape could never have accomplished that surprising feat of being both a designed contradiction to flatness and yet a visual affirmation and mainstay of flatness. Here, of course, both design and coloring of edge areas are crucial. In Stalls, the protruding triangles at the upper right edge are strongly and flatly colored in comparison to the rest of the work, and this helps it rest so firmly on the wall. In Fan, the decisively drawn lower flap achieves this same result. Both these works are, significantly, very straightforward in their design, as are the two Sawtooth paintings. In contrast, the ambitious, but not entirely successful, Four Block Box seems too complicated, the “back” shapes too hard to sort out for it to achieve the fluent strength of Davis’s best pictures. And that Davis can now ally fluency of design to an adjustment of flat color without much recourse to that lacteal flecking of much of his earlier work (and which was really just using a convention of surface properties rather than coming to terms with surface itself) is very much to his credit. While his surfaces are still patently artificial and the ultimate affirmation of flatness very much depends on their shininess, they are never prettified. Indeed, although the colors are often high in intensity and brightness, the effect is almost sober and certainly distinguished.

There is about Ronald Davis, the man and his work, a paradox.

Several, in fact.

For over four decades he has, in his many expressions, both two and three-dimensional, straddled an aesthetic and artistic divide between abstraction and representation, sculpture and painting, conceptualism and traditional object-making.

Davis announced himself with authority in the mid-‘60s, straight out of the San Francisco Art Institute, with paintings made of molded polyester resin and fiberglass. They were the Perfect Thing at the Perfect Time. The geometric-shaped, illusionary works in vivid, virtuosic color combinations, depicted rectangular forms in perspective. They floated in the indeterminate space as physical entities, shifting from two to three dimensions and back again. Somehow, they seemed to resolve Frank Stella’s post-Abstract Expressionist conceit of painting-as-object with Ucello’s early Renaissance perspective that embraced the history of painting stretching back half a millennium.

Davis’s ingenious escape from the canvas and two dimensions demonstrated the painting as the illusion of an object, and an object that was the illusion of a painting. A neat little trick that Marcel Duchamp had pulled off several decades earlier. (It is notable that we are now as far removed from that ‘60s moment in Davis’s artistic career as Davis was then removed from Duchamp’s revolutionary impact in the ‘20s.)

In contrast, the un-Perfect thing at the un-Perfect time was his early ‘80s “Music Series” — large splatter paintings that were a response and homage to Jackson Pollock, at a time when Pollock was as relevant and happening as, say, figurative painting. The random rightness of the jazzy, wildly colored canvases did create a visual music that swung hard, and reminded us that, as someone once said (was it Terry Southern?): “Any fool can drip paint, but how many have the when/where to stop it?”

At around the same time Davis was riffing on Pollock in old-fashioned paint on canvas, he started using the computer to summon visions from the early virtual world. He has been playing with computer-generated graphics and printers ever since.

For the past couple of years Davis has been rendering images — mostly geometric abstractions, a coffee cup, strange “spaces,” portraits of U.S. presidents as framed portraits in a gallery room setting — on his computer screen using a high-end three-dimensional program. These images are then uploaded to Imagewizards, Inc. in North Carolina (brought to Davis’s attention via a serendipitous “spam” e-mail) that prints them by transfer process onto sheets of brushed or high-gloss anodized aluminum of variable size. The resulting image-objects are confusing, subversive, paradoxical.

Since the early ‘90s Davis has lived reclusively in a cluster of six separate modest-sized structures out at the end of a road very near the melodramatic Rio Grande Gorge in Arroyo Hondo, New Mexico.

“It’s nice to live next to a crack,” he remarks offhand, inscrutably.

Standing before the reflective sheen and mesmerizing color combinations of “Five Block Row,” 2006 (borrowed from his 1972 painting), the question immediately arises: What is it?

“I’ll sit down and talk technical stuff and Craft 101 with people all day if they want, but…” Pause. “There’s an element of a beer sign about it, don’t you think?”

Well, yes, and no.

“This woman came to interview me in Malibu once,” he recalls. “She was doing a biography of Clement Greenberg. I was showing her one of my digital pieces on-screen and she asked me, ‘Is that a photograph, or a painting?’ When I told her what it was (a 3D computer rendering) she said, ‘That’s horrifying!’ I couldn’t believe it. So I asked her — ‘You’re a writer, right? Do you use a word processor? I use a graphic processor.’ ‘It’s not the same,’ she said. Why not? Why is something done with a stick with hair on the end of it, better, or not? I don’t get it.”

Appraising the portraits-within-portraits of Harry Truman and George Washington the Pop Art hit is inescapable.

“Like Andy said, ‘I like soup.’ I like Truman. I mean, why can’t I be a Pop painter?”

Why not, indeed? Just the sort of paradox Davis has posed with his visual rhetoric for over four decades.

“I’m just doing what’s interesting at the moment. And I see how long that moment can last, how far the parameters can extend.”

Pause.

“It’s either without thought or effort, or it’s all you think about. One of the two.”

A paradox.

Tom Collins is a writer based in northern New Mexico. He has written about art and artists for more than 25 years. He also writes about literature, politics, sports and history.

Former Californian Ronald Davis, who went by just the name Ron 40 years ago, has also kept thinking seriously about the peculiar relations between what paintings contain and what they are, though the limelight deserted him after the 1960s.

Trillium Press recently renamed itself Electric Works and relocated from the Peninsula to a San Francisco venue large enough to hold modest exhibitions. The fourth so far, which ends today, glances through five decades of Davis’ work.

Many visitors will recognize, from art history books, Davis works in tinged resin such as “Double See Through” (1969). In their scummy color and translucency they look today like flip West Coast rejoinders to the shaped canvases with which Frank Stella made his name.

Davis worked his way through a phase of painting shapes without scale on large, rectangular canvases such as the 6-foot-tall “Upright Striped Slab Duet” (1986). The painting seems to fall halfway between perspective exercise and design for a possible sculptural environment.

But such pictures, in this survey, look like ways Davis kept his hand in while waiting for computer imaging technology to make possible his dye-transfer-on-aluminum images of the past few years.

These pieces present plainly unreal objects, again without scale, in illusionary spaces as seductive to the eye as their material supports are solid.

The ubiquity of computer technology may make it seem as if anyone might have arrived at these peculiar, objectified dreams of sculpture. But even the present slender history of Davis’ career says otherwise.

[This essay was originally printed in the catalog that accompanied the forty work retrospective, “Ronald Davis: Abstractions 1962 – 2002,” exhibited at the Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio in October, 2002.]

The best abstract painting made in America during the past thirty-five years has been eclipsed. Great American abstract painting hasn’t been replaced by anything comparable, and I’m using the word eclipse here because eclipses pass. Fanfare and fluff tend to obscure what has always been: that great art gets overlooked by mediocrity, pretense and market strategies, and today is no exception.

We all pay the price and suffer the vagaries of money and fashion in an art world with little or no taste and seemingly little regard for quality. Without belaboring the point too much, the greatest, most universal, timeless, original, genuine and important works made by American abstract painters now in their fifties and sixties are by and large suppressed from text-books, academia, art magazines and museum stages across the world. With very few exceptions, many important American abstract painters have fallen into obscurity and some have fallen by the wayside. None-the-less, and to our benefit, there are dozens of great American abstract painters who, though sometimes disillusioned and suppressed, have still continued to produce their work, and Ronald Davis – who’s had his share of the limelight – is one of the best.

I’ve known Ron Davis and his work for nearly forty years. I first encountered his paintings in 1964 when I was an art student at The San Francisco Art Institute. Ron had recently left the Art Institute, and I’d hear about these guys who were painting hard-edge paintings in a roller rink. I was painting hard-edge paintings too and my name is Ronnie so I looked at his work, which I saw at the Art Institute. Clearly his paintings were among the best student paintings I’d seen and I’d been looking at student work all over the country at that point. Over the years we’ve become friends and we’ve talked for countless hours about art and life. Ron is a generous soul, he is tough-minded about his art, he has had his share of grief and struggle, he’s raised a family the best he could, and he’s fought many internal battles with himself. He is a spiritual man, as I think most important painters are, even if they don’t let on.

When I visited Davis’s studio in downtown Los Angeles in January 1969 and saw his new resin paintings for the first time, I was thunderstruck. It can be argued that between 1966 and 1972 Davis produced one of the most remarkable bodies of work ever created by an artist on these shores. Certainly the Dodecagons from 1968-69 remain among the most visually stunning, audacious and intellectually interesting bodies of work made by an abstract painter in the last half of the twentieth century.

Davis, born in California and raised in Wyoming, was inspired by Jackson Pollock and, against all kinds of logic, remains perhaps the only American painter who has successfully used Pollock’s drip and splatter technique with fruition. His virtuoso paint handling in the resin paintings created a new kind of geometric expressionism, keeping an unspoken promise made to Abstract Expressionism years before.

Ronald Davis refers to his work as Abstract Illusionism. With the Dodecagons, Davis created plastic paintings that were optical illusions of shapes in three dimensions, under a flat shiny surface on a twelve-angled object to be seen on the wall. They essentially broke all the rules of modernist rhetoric while being brilliant modernist paintings, there-by expanding the definition of modernism. It’s difficult to remember just how innovative and radical these paintings were when they were made. The paintings of 1968-1969 were daring in so many ways. Davis took risks with his perspective drawing, color, use of transparency, his paint handling, his materials, his shapes, his style, and his use of illusion. He essentially painted his resin paintings backwards, face down, unseen, under the picture plane. They are utterly original and brilliantly conceived.

Besides masterpieces like Zodiac, Double Ring Roto, Spoke and Double Ring, an early Dodecagon I find particularly interesting is Spindle. Spindle, 1968, with a deceptively simple geometric format, breaks new ground with its clear painterly forms, mysterious depths of field (nearly dispensing with perspective and illusion), reading flatter than most of Davis’s paintings. In Spindle, the hard reflective surface toughens the picture and gives strength to its lyricism.

Among the few reservations that I have about Davis’s work of that period, albeit in retrospect, is his use of plastic surfaces which, as impressive as they look, tend to interfere with my ability to feel his paintings full force. The glossy plastic surface casts reflections and those reflections reveal pictures of pictures that I find distracting, although the reflections add to the power of the work. The plastic surfaces tend to be cold and put me off when I look at the paintings. I can’t feel them, perhaps because instead of paint on a surface they are paint under a surface. Paradoxically that is also one of the strengths of these works. If the weakness is the hard, glossy surface, the artist’s painterly skill transcends mere surface more often than not. I think Davis’s consistent use of forms in perspective sometimes gets in the way of discerning the pure quality of the paintings, which are extraordinary and in my opinion don’t always need the rendering of the illusion of forms in space. I think Davis succeeds as often as he does because of his color, his versatile surfaces and the concentration, intensity and clarity of his vision. When Davis allows himself the freedom to just paint pictures, the results are usually remarkable. I’d prefer more emphasis on pure feeling, paint quality, directness, transparency, translucency, surface vulnerability and drawing. When Davis is most successful, his paintings draw you in, providing easy access to the viewer. His paintings succeed most often when they resonate with the power, timelessness, and clarity that is always there in his best work.

It’s probably worth saying that during the late sixties there was a lyrical revolution in American abstract painting. By the early seventies the strongest and most independent young artists were disenchanted with the hypocrisy and hierarchy of the Formalist followers of Greenberg and gave it up looking for alternatives. The second generation Abstract Expressionists, who Clement Greenberg called “Post-Painterly Abstractionists” and everyone else called “The Color Field Painters,” had essentially closed down the field. Trying to find alternatives to the pedantic and tedious rhetoric of minimalism and formalism, some independent young painters changed the face of painting radically.

Young artists looked again to their origins as modernist painters, going all the way back to Goya, Manet, Monet, Cþzanne, Chinese and Japanese landscape painting, Luminism, and The Hudson River School for new inspiration. Hans Hofmann, Jackson Pollock, Clyfford Still, Barnett Newman, and other abstract expressionists were renewed as sources for inspiration. In a search for meaning the landscape provided the fertile direction for change. Young painters in the late sixties created a new hybrid abstract art that was about process, but was also about liberation, subjectivity, and sincerity. It was about making art that was painterly, pictorial, historical, precise, geometric, literal, spiritual, and occasionally overtly representational.

The direction those artists took demanded a more personal and poetic course than the ones proscribed by the philosophies of minimalism and the philosophies of color field painting. Ironically, the innovations and influence of Lyrical Abstraction as it was then called quickly spread to the older Post-Painterly Abstractionists, the so-called Color Field Painters, who relaxed their dogmatic approach and limited mannerisms, quickly embracing and following many of the ideas originated by Lyrical Abstraction and the new generation. Consequently, taking the cue from us, the Color Field Painters dropped theory and became painterly, pictorial and landscape oriented, thereby also liberating themselves. Along with other painters of his generation (like me) Ronald Davis was one of the important leaders of that revolution.

The paintings that first brought Davis international acclaim were the Slab paintings begun in 1966 and exhibited at Tibor de Nagy Gallery in New York City in October, 1966. The buzz around New York among most of my painter friends and at Max’s was about how important that show was, and I agreed. The paintings I saw were complex, precise, although somewhat repetitious, and began what was to become one of the most astonishing six year runs in American painting. Six-Ninths Red is a significant painting of the series, made with molded polyester resin and fiberglass mounted on wood. The paintings depict rectangular forms in perspective. Frankly these are very difficult paintings to describe. Generally the viewer is looking down onto the paintings in which a rectangular slab is seen from the top, shaped in an overall diamond, with a smaller rectangular slab at one end, and what appears to be the other side of the slab minus the piece on the end. Six-Ninths Blue was reproduced on the cover of ArtForum in April 1967 and in that issue Michael Fried authored an important article, Ronald Davis: Surface and Illusion. Fried discussed Davis’s use of three-dimensional illusion, two-point perspective and the unique surface quality those works had.

I think the paintings have a curious way of dealing with time and space; they take a lot of time to digest, and the forms that seem to occupy particular spaces seem to slide around a lot. Sometimes the smaller slab slides away from the other slab, and sometimes the viewer senses an impending collision on the part of one or both of the rectangular slabs. The surfaces make these paintings special; they are painted from the back, face down on a smooth fiberglass mold and are both translucent and opaque. Translucency adds to the rich mystery and tension these paintings evoke. My favorite painting from that series was One-Ninth Green (The Unicorn Pen) which was nearly totally trans-lucent. Nothing like them had been done before. One minor aspect of these paintings is their wit. For Davis, humor, paradox and wordplay seem to have a special place. There is a Duchampian aspect to Davis’s work too, best comprehended by contemplating Duchamp’s The Large Glass, T’M, and The Chocolate Grinder. Davis’s work relates to the only charm Duchamp has for me: his sense of humor.

Davis followed the Slab Series of 1966, the Crab Series of 1967 and the Dodecagons of 1968-1969 with the Cutout Series in the early seventies. The Cutouts are especially remarkable for their refined use of transparency, and those paintings should be fully appreciated for their sheer beauty and sophisticated uniqueness and delicacy. The level of concentration in the Cutouts is exceedingly high. They are perfection in their complex directness; perhaps they were the zenith of the run of paintings Davis made in downtown Los Angeles. When I first saw them around 1971 I admit that I didn’t understand them, then. In retrospect they have gotten far better for me and I realize that, as my own taste has grown over the years, I’ve come to understand and appreciate those pictures. Those were the last series of Davis’s resin paintings as he left downtown Los Angeles in 1972 and moved into his mostly self-designed studio built in collaboration with then-unknown architect Frank Gehry in Malibu. In his new studio and for reasons of health and aesthetics, Davis discontinued working with the extremely toxic fiberglass and resins of the previous six years in favor of works on paper, prints and the slightly more benign paint and canvas which he took up in 1973.

For me, besides his resin paintings of 1966-72, the most enigmatic, thought provoking and successful series of Davis’s work are the Snap Line Paintings, which were done in the mid-1970s and taken up again in the late 1980s. Generally they were large-scale, and uncharacteristically made on rectangular canvases. He painted grounds of loose, painterly, acrylic stains, often applied with random abandon and overlaid with a precise network of dry pigment snap lines. He used a full range of painted surfaces, opacity, translucency, transparency; and his color was often charged with emotion. The paintings feel right, they are intense, urgent and intelligent. The Snap Line Paintings define whole complex universes of geometric shapes in perspective, resembling mathematical portraits of objects in space, suspended in a psychological landscape. The paintings combine (as Davis tends to do in his best work) several historical directions in one. The viewer has quick access because they are so direct and are endlessly filled with rich, subtle meaning and nuance. While Davis has created works in a wide range of manners he is inconsistent within his varied series, and the Snap Lines sometimes seem a little forced. From the beginning, Davis has had a preoccupation with re-defining abstract painting. His interest in trying new materials and new shapes goes back four decades. He’s a paradoxical mixture in that his sensibility is clearly grounded in conventional painting but his paintings are rarely ever conventional. His long running interest in computers, plastics, inventing new and different surfaces to paint on, his use of animator’s colors, resins, encaustic, and acrylics sets him apart from most other painters. He makes geometric objects, in relationship to the viewer, the wall, each other, often with the illusion of perspective, deep space, shallow space, or infinite space. While these are consistent and co-existing themes in his work, there have been other works that chart other directions too.

Davis is a painter of precise and paradoxical measure, practice and procedure. His new paintings are object-like and seemingly non-pictorial. The theme of objects in space has been a constant in Davis’s work for forty years, and these new paintings are a continuation of that theme with a renewed sense of vitality and commitment. These new works are the most succinct paintings of his long career. Yellow Hinge, 2001, for example, reads quickly as abstract object on the wall, intensely and sensitively colored and at the same time highly complicated when read as an abstract object in space, carefully balanced and constructed so the illusion of bends and twists in space is often literal.

Ronald Davis is once again the master of illusion but this time a little more direct. The surfaces of his new paintings are worked with layers of paint rolled on sometimes thick and heavy, allowing for the pure language of surface to flow fast and then slowly emerge in the eye as paint and as in some cases literal material. His color is full, loaded, aimed at the viewer, and he pulls no punches; the emotional impact is compelling. It’s surprising that for a painter as conceptual and cerebral as Davis, his color is so crucial to the power of his paintings. His color is passionate at times, cool at times, always carefully weighed and intuitively regulated. He is a complicated and sometimes weird combination of brilliant forethought and planning and spontaneous combustion. The poetry in his work comes with a mathematical precision and a master painter’s imagination. He hasn’t exactly made paintings in the conventional sense of paint on a rectangular canvas for many years and the argument can be made that these paintings aren’t paintings. Which is one reason Davis’s work is always interesting.

The range of style that Davis allows for is usually fairly close, going from hard edge precision to a loose painterly relaxed manner that tends to be contained in an organized, controlled system of ribbons, boxes or bands of color. A new work, Octagon Ring, 2001-2002, is organized in such a way, and is a good example of one of the typical container type formats Davis has used in variation over the years.

His new prints and digital work on the computer are decisively pictorial. In Ball and Chain, 2001, and Mazzocchio in Room, 2001, he creates abstract still-life using geometric imagery that verges on realism in a surreal kind of way. As if to underscore his penchant for word play and allusion to realism, Crate 99, 2001 is a picture of an actual wooden box with lettering and wood grain included used to contain paintings when they are shipped. There are a few series from the late seventies to mid-eighties, notably The Music Series, the Floaters and the Checkerboards, that also read primarily as pictures with an abstract geometric narrative at the heart. The Music Series is Davis’s most direct homage to Jackson Pollock who remains one of his most important inspirations, and those paintings ironically remain among Davis’s most under-appreciated bodies of work. The Music Series breaks free of the constraints of style Davis usually imposes upon himself and often they are unabashed expressionist pictures occasionally held in check by various floating, phantom shapes.

By the late 1960s Davis was showing his paintings in leading galleries worldwide. He was represented by his longtime dealer and friend Nicholas Wilder in Los Angeles, Leo Castelli Gallery in New York, Kasmin Gallery in London, and David Mirvish Gallery in Canada. Davis’s paintings were widely collected by important museums and private collectors all over the world. Articles about his work were written, and his paintings were shown everywhere there was an important venue for contemporary art. During the late seventies and until the early nineties, Davis was represented by the BlumHelman Galleries in New York and Los Angeles and since the early seventies the John Berggruen Gallery in San Francisco. While fashions came and went, Davis continued producing his visions, remaining true to his essential self.

In 1962, I saw an exhibition that rocked the world. The Sidney Janis Gallery shocked me, and the art world, with The New Realism Show in a rented storefront on 57th Street. That exhibition marked the official arrival of Pop Art in the very heart of the abstract expressionist stronghold. The arrival of Pop Art and the advent of Post-Painterly Abstraction and Minimalism had by 1962 struck a nearly fatal blow to Abstract Expressionism. I regularly began visiting Dick Bellamy’s Green Gallery where I saw Op Art, Hard-Edge Painting, Pop Art, Minimalism and frankly, I was stunned. I was fifteen and an art student on 57th St. in New York, painting large gestural abstract expressionist oil paintings with charcoal and enamels, working in a manner similar to the artists I admired most: Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Hans Hofmann, Franz Kline. I began to rethink what I was doing after I’d been to the Kansas City Art Institute (and left in early November 1963) having done scores of abstract expressionist paintings in my two months there. I’d met Hans Hofmann at the Kootz Gallery in December 1963, and Hofmann words of encouragement impacted me almost as much as his paintings did. Hofmann’s rich, deep color range, his sophisticated formats, his free and bold brushwork, his occasional use of white grounds, the masterful use of hard-edge rectangles against organic stains, had left an indelible impression on me. In early 1964 after I turned seventeen I decided it was time for a big change in my work. I hit the road, left New York City and headed for California determined to create new paintings. When I settled in Berkeley in March 1964 I began to paint my first hard-edge acrylic paintings. The challenge I faced was how to bridge all that I loved about Abstract Expressionism with all that I’d seen that was new and radical; I vowed to myself that I’d find the way.

It’s nearly forty years since I first saw Ronald Davis’s work in San Francisco in 1964. He struck me then as an important new painter and thirty-eight years later, having created a deep and rich legacy of art in five decades, he remains an even more important painter. In 1964 I saw hard-edge acrylic paintings of high levels of intensity, clearly distinguished, defining and dealing with major issues facing advanced American abstract painting of that time. The dilemma many young abstract painters faced was how to create relevant, meaningful art that was new, would reflect their own time, and would be viable, universal and as timeless as was the best Abstract Expressionism. Some of the issues were clarity, clear color, sharp surface distinction and the elimination of the subjective, relational approach for a more rational decision making process. I was struck by the level of quality in Ron’s work and the interesting resonance his work had with some of the best new work I’d seen in New York.

In 1993, Ronald Davis moved to Arroyo Hondo, New Mexico, where in collaboration with architect Dennis Holloway and anthropologist Charley Cambridge he built a compound of six Navajo-type hogans to live and work in. Davis has worked in many mediums, and in 1997 he created the remarkable, educational web site www.abstract-art.com. He has made masterful digital works on the computer for two decades, and some of his digital works are among his most stirring and moving images.

For all of his humor, subtle wit and clever ideas, Davis is a sincere artist. He came to painting somewhat late at the age of twenty-two. He is a shy but straight and direct person and that’s reflected in his achievement. There is no place for irony or cynicism in Davis’s work; he is from a generation of American painters who are somewhat irreverent, independent and very serious about what they do, and Ronald Davis has always been aware of his place in American art history. Today he continues to create paintings of high quality and, if the issues have changed as indeed the world has changed, then the richness of his new art as does the richness of all great painting from any time will continue to compel anyone who loves the art of painting.

– Ronnie Landfield, NYC, March 2002

[Ronnie Landfield is an abstract painter who lives and works in New York City. He is represented by the Salander/O’Reilly Galleries. Since 1966, at the age of nineteen, Mr. Landfield’s paintings have been included in hundreds of group exhibitions worldwide. Since his debut in 1969 at the David Whitney Gallery in New York, Landfield has had nearly sixty one-man shows of his work. His paintings are in the permanent collections of dozens of museums worldwide including the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the National Gallery, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and the Art Institute of Chicago, among others. His work is also included in hundreds of private and corporate collections as well. Mr. Landfield equates his time spent at Max’s Kansas City from 1966 to 1970 with the equivalent of a graduate school education in the New York art world. He taught fine arts at the School of Visual Arts from 1975 until 1989. He currently teaches at The Art Students League in Manhattan.]

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 harden 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 produced with the latest technology 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.

Ronald Davis was an exemplar of the 1960s Los Angeles Fetish Movement–a group of artists who transformed plastic, fiberglass, and other materials into brightly colored, hard-edge geometric forms. He was also an early practitioner of trompe l’oeil abstract illusionism that pervaded abstract painting in the 1970s and ’80s. He once exhibited widely and frequently, and has never withdrawn completely from the circuit; but, over the past 30 years, he has assumed a lesser presence, moving to Taos and becoming involved in electronic music and other relatively hermetic pursuits.

This selection of work from 1974 to 2004 was especially welcome because Davis seems to be doing some of the strongest painting of his career. Two 2004 asymetric, diamond-shape canvases with beveled edges attested to this. Each featured two solid, intense colors divided by a horizon line at the diamond’s widest point and bevels painted in different hues. This sophisticated sense of geometry harks back directly to the work with which Davis made his initial splash in the 1960s, and which he continued to refine for another decade, as was evident here in two architectonic abstractions from the mid-1970s.

His 1980s output was represented largely by paintings from 1983, including one composed of architectonic lines that appear in earlier works: they define an odd complex of forms made odder here by an allover stippled effect. Another painting displayed a simplified abstract-illusionist schema–a yellow platform floating in blue ether, casting a double shadow on an otherwise invisible floor.

Several canvases evinced a kind of Abstract Expressionist splat-and-drip esthetic. There was a large one called with aggressive splotches, and smaller, square ones marked by isolated clots and trails of hot and cool color against white.

This show posed many tantalizing questions about what Davis was up to in the 1980s and ’90s. Most important, however, it assured us that he is focusing anew on distinctive, and distinguished, work.

Ron Davis is a young California artist whose new paintings, recently shown at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in New York, are among the most significant produced anywhere during the past few years, and place him, along with Stella and Bannard, at the forefront of his generation. In at least two respects Davis’ work is characteristically Californian: it makes impressive use of new materials – specifically, plastic backed with fiberglass – and it exploits an untrammeled illusionism. But these previously had yielded nothing more than extraordinarily attractive objects, such as Larry Bell’s coated glass boxes, or ravishing, ostensibly pictorial effects, as in Robert Irwin’s recent work. (In the first instance illusion is rendered literal, while in the second it dissolves literalness entirely.) Whereas Davis’ new work achieves an unequivocal identity as painting. That this is so is a matter of conviction. One recognizes Davis’ new work as painting: in my case, with amazement – and, at first, distrust, even resentment – that what I was experiencing as paintings were, after all, made of plastic. Not that Davis’ paintings are what they are in spite of being made of plastic or presenting a compelling illusion of a solid object in strong perspective. On the contrary, it is precisely Davis’ refusal to settle for anything but ambitious painting that, one feels, has compelled him to use both new materials and two-point perspective. What incites amazement is that that ambition could be realized in this way – that, for example, after a lapse of at least a century, rigorous perspective could again be come a medium of painting. Davis’ paintings are, I suggest, the most extreme response so far to the situation described in my essay Shape as Form: Frank Stella’s New Paintings.(1)

Roughly, Davis has used perspective illusion – the illusion that the painting as a whole is a solid object seen in two-point perspective from above – to relieve the pressure under which, within that situation, the shape of the support (or literal shape) has come to find itself. The limits of Davis’ new paintings present themselves as the edges of a three-dimensional entity rather than of a flat surface; and in fact it is virtually impossible to grasp the literal shape of paintings like Six-Ninths Blue and Six-Ninths Red just by looking at them. (One is forced, so to speak, to trace their limits and then see what one has.) As a result, the question of whether or not the literal shapes of Davis’ new paintings hold, or stamp them selves out, or compel conviction a burning question within the situation referred to – simply does not arise. More precisely, it does not arise as long as the illusion of three dimensionality remains compelling: if, in a given painting, for whatever reason; the illusion is felt to be in jeopardy, that painting’s ability to hold as shape is rendered question able as well. (Something of the kind may happen in Two-Ninths Grey, in which the projected object is not, to my mind, sufficiently comprehensible. What, for example, is the precise relation of the two gray blocks to the larger red slab on which they seem to sit? In general, Davis can not afford much ambiguity or indeterminacy, both of which compromise his paintings’ apparent objecthood.)

A great deal, then, depends upon the power of the illusion; and it was, I believe, in order to achieve that power that Davis gave up working in paint on canvas and began to explore the possibility of making his new paintings in plastic. In any case, the fact that in his new paintings color is not applied to the surface in any way, but instead seems physically to lie somewhere behind it, makes the illusion of objecthood infinitely more compelling than would otherwise be the case. In this respect Davis’ new paintings represent not only an inspired resuscitation of, but a deep break with, traditional illusionism: in the latter paint on the surface of the canvas creates the illusion of objects in space; while in Davis’ paintings whatever makes the illusion is not, it seems, situated on, or at, the surface at all. (The illusion of objecthood is intensified still more by the way in which the colored plastic – in which Davis has also mixed mirror flake, aluminum powder, bronze powder and pearl essence – not merely represents but imitates the materiality of solid things.) Conversely, the surface of these paintings is experienced in unique isolation from the illusion. It has been prized loose from the rest of the painting – as though what hangs on the wall is the surface alone. In Davis’ new paintings a detached surface coexists with a detached illusion. (In this respect his paintings are the opposite of Olitski’s, in which there is “an illusion of depth that somehow extrudes all suggestions of depth back to the picture’s surface.”(2)) Indeed, the detached surface coincides with the detached illusion: which is why the question of whether or not the shape of that surface holds or stamps itself out does not arise. Davis deliberately – and, I think, profoundly – heightens one’s sense of the mutual independence of surface and illusion by rather sharply beveling the edges of his paintings from behind. This means that even when the beholder is not standing directly in front of a given painting, no support of any kind can be seen. The surface is felt to be exactly that, a surface, and nothing more. It is not, one might say, the surface of anything – except, of course, of a painting.

Moreover, Davis’ surface is some thing new in painting: not because it is shiny and reflects light – that was also true of the varnished surfaces of the Old Masters – but be cause what one experiences as surface in these paintings is that reflectance and nothing more. The precise degree of reflectance is important. If the painting is too shiny the surface is emphasized at the expense of the illusion; and this in turn under mines the independence of both. At the same time, Davis’ paintings make transparency important as never be fore: not because their surfaces are experienced as transparent – one does not, I want to say, look through so much as past them(3) – but because the layers of colored plastic behind their surfaces vary in opacity. The relation between the surface and the rest of a transparent object is different from that between the surface and the rest of an opaque one: roughly, in the former case it is as though the beholder can see all of the object, not just the portion that his eyesight touches. In Davis’ new work this difference becomes important to painting for the first time, by making possible, or greatly strengthening, the relation between surface and illusion that I have tried to describe.

Finally, I want at least to touch on the character of the illusionism in these paintings. Despite its dependence on the rigorous application of two-point perspective, it, too, is new in painting. Roughly, the illusion is of something one takes to be a square slab (some portions of which have been removed), turned so that one of its corners points in the general direction of the beholder, and seen from above. What seems to me of special interest is this: the illusion is such that one simply assumes that the projected slab is horizontal, as though Laying on the ground; but this means that looking down at it could be managed only from a position considerably above both the slab itself and the imaginary ground-plane it seems to define. Moreover, the beholder is not only suspended above the slab; he is simultaneously tilted toward it – otherwise he would not be in a position to look down at the slab at all. In Davis’ new paintings the illusion of objecthood does not excavate the wall so much as it dissolves the ground under one’s feet: as though experiencing the surface and the illusion independently of one another were the result of standing in radically different physical relations to them. Davis’ illusionism addresses itself not just to eyesight but to a sense that might be called one of directionality. There have been strong intimations of such a development in recent painting, notably that of Noland and Olitski; in fact, I recently claimed of Olitski’s spray paintings that what is appealed to is not our ability in locating objects (or failing to) but in orienting ourselves (or failing to).(4) This seems to me dramatically true of Davis’ new paintings as well.

The possibilities which Davis has been able to realize in his first plastic paintings still seem to me scarcely imaginable. The possibilities which they open up belong to the future of painting.

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¹ ARTFORUM, Vol. 5, No. 3, November 1966.

² Clement Greenberg, in the catalog to the United States Pavilion in the 1966 Venice Biennial.

³ Not the way one looks past an object so much as the way one looks past a reflection.

4 In the catalog essay to Olitski’s forthcoming exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery.