Georgia State University Art Gallery
January 21-February 1, 1985
Although Ben Davis is better known for his photographs and video works, he has for some time now made large, single-image pictures drawn in oil crayons and in pencil of very ordinary objects suspended in empty fields activated by extreme color and gesture.
Much of what we feel in response to the images is conveyed in the interaction of figure and ground. The ground, like a vast space become a purely informational field, its heavily worked surface often layered with color rubbed through to underlying layers, sometimes approaching an almost encaustic-like thickness. Color is an important agent in defining the object and conditioning the viewer's response. At time the convergence of color is electric and creates motion; retinal opposites of green and red flash peripherally, changes grey into pink, black and red create competing magnetic forces. Continuing the energy and motion in surface manipulation and use of color is the gesture, sometimes stroked down, sometimes rampaging across the paper, so aggressively stated that the image is animated with expression and emotion. Occasionally the image itself signifies some active agent: a rose is plucked, a telephone receiver is tilted as though in use.
Although animated by gesture and color and encoded with subtle messages of action, these solitary images are static and abandoned as thought the sense of absence were cultivated. Like remnants isolated from another time and place the images are cast into empty, self referential spacescapes. The images become mediator between and empirically felt reality as fragments of hard information are collected from the convergence of figure and ground and the feelings and emotions associated with the remembered object, the matrix through which the final analysis of the work is filtered.
To a large extent the images are about how memory operates as a tool in the creation of meaning, but because the viewer is actively involved in the image (through the use of perspective and the inherent motion in the drawings) memory is no longer closed but is brought forward as an open system to be incorporated into the present. Davis' approach to drawing is not unlike that of the 19th-century symbolists who advocated painting from memory. The object existed, not in and of itself, but as device or catalyst to unlock residual information, to grasp truths not readily apparent.
The viewer, seemingly suspended with the images on the fringes of space, orbiting with these snatches of everyday life around a remote point of origin, becomes the object of its own analysis.
In identifying the object, the very act of identification is isolated. By removing the image from any visual context, a spotlight is turned upon how we process information and incorporate it within a meaningful schema. What Davis searches for in the association of emotion and symbol and memory is the key to how we ultimately project and assume identity.
Davis continues to rely upon essential components whether confronting complex emotional dilemmas or enjoying the wonder of the world. Ultimately Davis has gone back to the Greeks, whose belief was that the universe is describable, is fundamentally simple and that at bottom it must be comprehensible.
JAN AVGIKOS