Page 53 - Studio International - December 1968

tilted towards it-otherwise he would not be in a ing language of art? you observe that this painty paint has no texture;
position to look down on the slab at all. In Davis' One is driven back to pictorial semantics. Davis it lies flat, embalmed and physically neutral­
new paintings the illusion of objecthood does not exploits perspective, not as a means of describing except for those sloshed edges-under a thick trans­
excavate the wall so much as it dissolves the some object in order to make its physical reality parent film of slightly yellowish plastic; back to
ground under one's feet . . . Davis' illusionism apprehensible through art, but simply as a mode of illusion again. So the viewer's reactions rattle to
addresses itself not just to eyesight but to a sense illusion. Under what conditions do we read this and fro between illusion and object, like an echo in
that might be called directionality ... polygon as a 3-D structure? And what is intrinsic a long alley. What is true of the paint also holds
One could well argue that every perspective illu­ to pain ting itself that pulls us back from reading? true of its properties: transparency, for example.
sion 'addresses itself ... to directionality', since The condition, for the first question, is that we for­ The transparent greenish planes of the outside ring
there must be a given viewpoint and a given orien­ get about the picture as a surface. The answer to of Double-Ringed Roto permit you to see the fins
tation of view for illusion to exist at all. (Curious the second is that paintings are always a surface through them, thus making explicit an illusionist,
as it may seem in retrospect, Piero never attended before they become anything else; and that they 3-D space. But where they cross the fins, the colour
a lecture at Bennington.) The implied eyeline of only become illusion by losing their primary status, values deepen disproportionately. A light sky-blue
Davis' perspective is, as I suggested earlier, that of that of a physical object. Davis has caught, in ex­ 'seen through' the scumbled green becomes a dark
a six-foot man, like Davis himself, staring at some­ quisite isolation, the fundamental paradox of all cobalt, verging on pure ultramarine: the picture
thing on the floor close to his feet. The vision of representational art. The flicker between illusion turns once more into segments of flat, discontinu­
Mr Fried hoisted into the air, as by a stage-wire, and object in his new paintings, seen a Kasmin's ous colour; it is an object. And so one might go on.
whilst feeling the ground move under him like in November, operates on a surprising number of What is amazing in Ron Davis' work is not, ob­
Hemingway's little rabbit, is enchanting and de­ levels. I have tried to describe the first-the tension viously, that the illusion-object debate is stated;
serves preservation as ajeu d'esprit; but it has little between the illusion of a regular, 'knowable' poly­ but that it is carried out with such aplomb and
to do with the sensations provoked by Ron Davis' gon seen in perspective, and the physical presence complexity, so laconically, without the done of the
paintings. of a flat fibreglass sheet with an actual contour pedant. The lushness of the paintings, with their
To resume. If Davis' aim were only to give infor­ which, isolated from perspective, is not geometric­ melting, gloopy colours (Matisse ice-cream) and
mation about a shape by drawing it in perspective, ally recognizable. But then there is the paint itself: pearlescent scumbling, is bait for Davis' trap of
his work would be utterly banal (except in colour). how each of the radiating fins and planes is pierced concepts. As long as the recent history of art con­
Any first-year architecture student could produce by gaps in the paint film, revealing-through illu­ tinues to be the main subject of American art-and
an essay in three-point perspective which was as sionistic space-the colour of the plane behind, there is no sign at present that it will cease to be
precise as Double-Ringed Roto, 1968. As perspec­ thereby stressing the apparent three-dimensionality that-Davis will rank with Stella as a kind of
tive exercises, Davis' images add nothing to Ucello's of the structure; while at the same time the gaps prodigy, a linguistic monster whose position,
faceted witch-ball spheres and polygonal rings, or are drippy and casual, so that (to borrow Fried's granted just one premise, is all but uncrackable.
to quattrocento intarsia-work. In what sense, then, word) the 'objecthood' of the paint is forced on
can one say that Davis has contributed to the exist- your attention at the expense of illusion. But next Robert Hughes

Ron Davis right, Channel 1968, 50½ x 132 in.
below right. Spoke 1968, 60½ x 136 in.;
facing page left. Double-ringed rotor 1968,
painted fibreglass. 60½ x 1 36 in.;
facing page top, Uccello, perspective drawing,
Ufizzi

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