Victor Davson
The Wilmer Jennings Gallery at Kenkeleba, 219 East 2nd Street (at Avenue B), NYC, until May 28, 2016.
All visuals are from the “Bad Cow Comin’ series of 1999.
About:
“The first pieces to garner serious critical attention in his new American domicile were Notational Works, an extended series of large black works on heavy paper that straddle the line between drawing and painting. The carefully worked surfaces are structured with black and white lines and often barely perceptual proto-geometric shapes. At a glance, they seem quite reticent and reductivist in impulse, but on further observation one could see that the geometry of drawn forms and lines was felt— intuitive, rather than strictly Pythagorean. In the end, the varying densities of rubbed black pigments suggest folded fields of inflected darkness flattened into the lateral spaces of its support. It was one of these pieces that became Davson’s first work of art to enter an American museum collection. These totally abstract pigment-paintings are in a way the culmination of the artist’s investigation, begun in Guyana, of contemporary modernist style and form. The ensuing years have brought modifications to that severe-appearing method. Expressive color has gradually reasserted itself on paper and canvas and in the latest paintings has effloresced into brilliant conceptual evocations of the Guyana masquerade. Of course, Davson has always used line to full effect, as seen in the delicate portraits of children drawn when he lived in Guyana. The recent ‘Limbo-Anancy’ series inspired by Guyana-born writer Wilson Harris’ literary metaphor, employs a webbed vortex of line spun into a metaphorical web that is a poignant and symbolic attempt to reconnect long lost histories, peoples and experience, leaning back across the wide divide of time and place.
From the black pigment-paintings of ‘Notational Works’ to the urban influenced ‘Chain link’ series and now, the ‘Lmbo Anansi’ and ‘Bad Cow Comin’’ sequence of works, the act of drawing into paint in Davson’s hands maintains its rhetorical value as a poetic and communicative device as well as a subtle allegorical power. In his alternative occupation as the co-founder and director of Aljira, A Center for Contemporary Art, in Newark, Davson has long worked to develop systems to nurture artists. In his personal work as an artist, he reaches back into an uneasy history, unstable memory and myth in order to comprehend how we got to this place. And he continues to inscribe notes along the way on a journey that reaches from there to here, from the past into the present.”
(From article ‘Victor Davson New Work’ of Carl E. Hazlewood, New York 2006)
