A new painting by Ian Davis, Supermarket (2017), encompasses a number of themes that frame this artistâs compelling dystopian vision. There is the content of the picture itself, an eerily sterile warehouse of identical stacked goods, marching away from the viewer in one-point perspective. The image is distinctively Davisâ, but reverberations from history inevitably emerge. One is reminded of Jacques Tatiâs Playtime, where the filmmaker greeted the advent of automation with suspicion as well as humor.
More recent examples would be the 1990s photographs of Andreas Gursky and the documentaries of Edward Burtynsky, where the monotony and repetition of factory labor are revealed in unrelenting fashion. Unlike these precedents, however, Davis is a painter, and his painstaking method creates a unique double-edged sword for the viewer. His high-resolution meticulousness is both attractive and disconcerting in its sharp attention to detail.
Like many artists, Davis had an aesthetic journey through different approaches and methodologies before fixing on his trademark style. Born in Indianapolis in 1972, he skateboarded his way through an uneventful Midwest adolescence with a vague notion of making art as a living. The fashion he embraced early and tenaciously was based on graffiti art and Jean-Michel Basquiat, sources that might appear far afield from where he landed. This early work, gestural and full of collaged and expressionistic elements, was developed during the artistâs years at Arizona State University where he majored in painting (and, according to Davis, wasnât taught any technique: âI didnât even know what a âwashâ was when I leftâ). He found more satisfaction outside of the academy, where his Basquiat-influenced paintings acquired an audience through a gallery in Scottsdale. Then in 2003, after a move to New York, Davis visited a retrospective of Basquiatâs work. Rather than reinforcing his fealty to this artistic mentor, the survey left him cold. âI was stopped in my tracks,â he remembers. âAll my marks had come from this one guy.â Davis started to transition into a cleaner, but more conceptually complicated, mode.
In 2005, he moved studios and decided to keep his latest environment âsplatter-free,â eschewing the cluttered graffiti vocabulary for a more pristine one. It wasnât just a change of space that initiated the shift. Davis attended a residency in Skowhegan, where he would graze in his spare time through the institutionâs library. (This was back when a surf on the smart phone wasnât so facile and a turn through the stacks had to suffice). There he found old issues of out-of-print magazines like American Heritage and Horizon, and was struck by the oddball articles about esoteric topics. He encountered artists that he hadnât fully studied before such as Magritte, Breughel and de Chirico, all of whom gave him the license to take on epic vistas and surrealistic subject matter.
Later, a trip to the UK made an enormous impression: there Davis explored cities like Liverpool, a contemporary metropolis with areas still as derelict as when World War II ended. Overall, the gray, post-industrial mise-en-scène overlapped with a growing sense of social consciousness that was brewing in Davisâ pictorial content. Most consequently, a stop in Manchester exposed him to the work of L.S. Lowry, a locally celebrated painter of Northwest Englandâs mill towns and docks. He was blown away by Lowryâs stark, naĂŻve cityscapes of âmatchstick menâ leaving the mills at quitting timeâscenes Davis had been unknowingly channeling.
Like the anonymous subjects in Lowryâs paintings, the status of humans in any given Davis tableau is usually no higher than a clinical mass of ants. Tiny figures in identical jumpers are depicted swarming around pools of seeping fuel tanks in Mine (2018); the characterless workers with sweep brooms strike identical poses, participating in futile combat with oozing toxic leaks. Similarly, Davis portrays minions in lab coats examining spurting oil lines in Pipeline (2017), a tour-de-force of linear and atmospheric perspective. In Eating (2015), dozens of men in police uniforms help themselves to a banquet, a scenario wrought doubly incongruous by their environmentâin this case, a vast, deserted plain, bathed in crepuscular light.
These and other new works evince a simplicity and directness of vision. Davis has created a political mode of art making that dwells powerfully on humanityâs irresponsibility towards the environment and one another. Like the best paintings, they are at once wonderful and horrible.
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