The Paintings of Noah Davis Refuse to Settle

Noah Davis had a mind for pastiche, pulling from sources as heterogeneous as ancient Egyptian mythology and the paintings of Édouard Manet, to the modernist architecture of Paul R. Williams, family albums and The Jerry Springer Show (1991–2018). Call it the time-traveller’s instinct. ‘He was a great student of art history,’ the curator Helen Molesworth told Scott Indrisek in a 2020 Artsy essay. ‘He had an enormous number of pictures in his head.’

Canon formation is a slow and liquid process, like developing film in the dark room of collective consciousness. Before his death in 2015, aged 32, from a rare form of cancer, Davis completed more than 400 paintings, drawings, sculptures and collages, and co-founded the Underground Museum in Los Angeles, with his wife, fellow artist Karon Davis. What endures? There’s Isis (2009), majestic, impassive, fanning her golden rays before a stretch of sun-bleached clapboard, and Bad Boy for Life (2007), bent over his mother’s lap for a spanking, small mouth shocked in a perfect O. But certain images refuse to settle. To call them riddles feels only half-correct. Riddles promise revelation.

The Future’s Future (2010) is a quietly bold composition in an oeuvre celebrated for its subtle humour and understatement. A profusion of brilliant, dark flora surrounds a faceless figure standing sentry beneath a circle of light, clean as freshly picked bone. It almost hums against the pool of liquid black, this inexlicable contraption, a Da Vinci flying machine retrofitted for the 21st century.

Perhaps it’s a self-portrait, Davis’s chrononaut alter ego: The Artist’s Artist, why not? A seeker caught in transit. Clad in a generic uniform – collared white button-down shirt, neat black trousers – he’s pure enigma, a puzzle without a key. His objective is anyone’s guess.

Lines bleed everywhere: grey streaks sully the ivory band, threads of startling white leak from the ink-black shoes, tendrils of greenery refuse containment. The prevailing spirit is elusive, like the gleam of light on water or a fugitive body streaking through the night, as in Candyman (2007). Meaning crests, sharpens into focus, vanishes.

The more I look, the less the image yields – a perverse reward. Here’s a mind of vertiginous speed that often preferred to hover on the threshold between worlds, in a state of indeterminacy. Davis’s paintings bristle with electricity, unmistakably original and ambitious, inviting speculation even as they refuse any final word. In the end, all that’s left is the image, braced on the cusp of coherence. Then – winking, laughing – it prepares for take-off, and it’s gone.

This article first appeared in frieze issue 251 with the headline ‘Spirit World’

‘Noah Davis’ is on view at Barbican, London, until 11 May and the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles from 8 June until 31 August

^{Main image: Noah Davis, The Future's Future (detail), 2010. Courtesy: © The Estate of Noah Davis and David Zwirner}