Page 52 - Studio International - December 1968

Ron Davis at Kasmin

It is a truism that photographs, however useful
they are in iconographical studies on art, cannot
actually substitute for the picture itself. There are
always distortions; the lens has its own modes of
illusion. But there are very few works of art which
can be said to be negated, cancelled out, when first
seen in a photo. Ron Davis' paintings fall into this
slim category: photography severs the root of their
illusion ism.
What you read from a plate of Six Ninths Blue,
1966, is a square slab of blue, presumably hard,
substance. I ls far corner is isolated by an L-shaped
trough, pale lime-yellow in colour, whose depth
appears to be about three-quarters the thickness of
the slab. The slab is lying on the floor, with one
corner pointing at you; the lens sees it from head­
height. use for it. Ron Davis has found one; but on a level face floats 'fi·ee' of the wall. The limits of the paint­
Every clue of depth-reading. perspective and which seems, at first, lo be curiously primitive. ing are the edges of the depicted object-a regular,
shadow offered by the photograph compels this By which I mean that his perspective is pre­ twelve-sided polygon. There are no other objects
reading of the Davis. And all the deductions (except Albertian. One of the crucial moments in the to which this depicted object can relate, and thus
the colour) arc wrong. The Davis is not a slab; it is development of perspective occurred with Brunel­ the purpose of 'spatial' perspective is (i·uslrated.
a plane surface. lt is not lying flat on the floor, but leschi's now lost painting of Piazza del Duomo, in The dodecagons are sizcless, scaleless and unmea­
hanging vertically on the wall. The eyeline does which (as far as one can reconstruct the painting surable as illusions; as objects, they are instantly
not slant down to it at an angle, but runs straight from Manetti's description of it) not only the ap­ knowable. The size of the illusion is the size of the
to the picture plane. It is not square, but an irregu­ pearance of individual buildings but also the pro­ object i Lself". Moreover, the geometrical figure which
lar fourteen-sided polygon. portionate size of all objects within the space were the paintings 'depict' never had an implicit size, as
These illusions persist, of course, in the face of the worked out in terms of a precise, repeatable mathe­ a man, a jug or a building does. It is a totally
object itself. But not as extravagantly: since a photo­ matical system. This system found its theoretical abstract figure.
graphic image is all illusion, it must perforce drain exposition with the publication of Alberti's Trattato In shon: Davis' perspective gives us no infor­
Davis' work of the complex balance between paint­ delta Pittura in H35. For Alberti, the essential sub­ mation about his forms that could not equally be
ing-as-thing and painting-as-illusion which is its ject of perspective was not objects, but the s/Jace conveyed by another, non-realistic mode of presen­
distinguishing characteristic, and its main claim lo around them. As John White put it,1 tation-such as isometric projection. There are no
originality. ... During the 13th and 14th centuries it was clues about the size of the polygon, or its distance
The ostensible subject of Davis' art is perspective. possible to see space gradually extending outwards from the eye. The only constant is the horizon line
Now the last fifty years of modern criticism have from the nucleus of the individual solid object, and -the eye's height above the polygon, implied by
inured us to the 'irrelevance' of perspective-a dis­ moving, stage by stage, towards emancipation perspective illusion. One recalls Michael Fried's
cipline Jong ago bundled up with the Apollo Bel­ from its tyranny. Now the pictorial process is com­ essay 2 on Ron Davis, in which he argued that
vedere's plaster leg and consigned lo the store­ plete. Space is created first, and then the solid ob­ ... the illusion is such that one simply assumes
rooms of the Academy, as one of the props of'mere' jects are arranged within it in accordance with the that the projected slab is horizontal ... but this
representation. It was, as successive critics pointed rules which it dictates. Space now contains the means that looking down on it could be managed
out, only one of a number of possible ways of stab­ object by which formerly it was created. only from a position considerably above both the
ilizing pictorial space and making it intelligible; Now Davis' perspective is not of this kind. It slab itself and the imaginary ground-plane it
some writers, such as Herbert Read, denigrated it addresses itself solely to the object. There is no seems to define. Moreover, the beholder is not only
as a 'mere' (that word again) convention, which it illusionistic space in his paintings. Nothing sur­ suspended above the slab; he is simultaneously
plainly is not. As a result, perspective slid from its rounds them except the white wall, to which they 1 .John White: The Birth and Rebirth of Pictorial Space.
exalted fifteenth-century function as the absolute are not related-in fact, any possible relation be­ Faber & Faber, I 967 (2nd ed.). p. 123.
test of pictorial truth, lo become one of several tween the image and that ground is suppressed by 2 Michael Fried. Ronald Davis: Surface and Illusion.
options-and unused al that. There seemed to be no bevelling the back of the painting, so that the sur- Articlf' in Art/arum, April 1967, pp. 39--40.

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