“A New York show reveals a great lost talent”

“The show is so good—yet so poignantly final—that it leaves you feeling both euphoric and wretched. As art, it stands alone, 100 percent persuasive.

[...]

There was nothing formulaic about Davis’s approach. Even when he was painting mundane domestic scenes, his eye for the subject and his painterly treatment infused them with a sly, soft-pedaled, gently melancholy wonder. One thinks of Fairfield Porter with a little more zing, or of a more nonchalant Peter Doig.

In several images, Davis showed people dwarfed by varieties of magical immensity. He would paint a child in blue pajamas at the foot of a daunting wooden staircase leading to a door emitting a mysterious cloud of colored glitter. Or a man looking at a monumental abstract sculpture on the leafy grounds of a wealthy estate. Or simply the night sky over Los Angeles.”
 
Read the full review in The Washington Post

Image: Installation view, Noah Davis, David Zwirner, New York, 2020