THERE'S A SENSE of quiet horror in the paintings of James G. Davis. Two nurses flee a burning city, the hand of an alluring nude woman lying on a beach has metamorphosed into a sharp claw, two voyeurs hidden by night's darkness ominously ogle a pair of lovers in a park.
Yet for all the barely suppressed disorder and sense of foreboding in Davis' work, now on view in Etherton's first big show of the season, his paintings are oddly still and silent. Like stop-action photography or, perhaps more to the point, like the images in dreams, Davis' paintings capture and fix moments in imaginary time. And for all their elegance of line--Davis is a master of drawing and printmaking--they embody what Davis himself has called the paradox of "mobile stability."
Davis embodies other paradoxes as well. A long-time Rancho Linda Vista resident and professor at the University of Arizona, Davis has traveled widely and studied broadly. His work is drenched in the lessons of European masters Manet and Goya and Munch, and Mexican painter Tamayo. And though he lives in a beautiful country place, in recent years he has frequently repaired to Berlin, the quintessential world-weary European city.
Like the Impressionists, Davis is a painterly chronicler of modern
life. His richly textured, cross-hatched oils, sprinkled with
glitter, interrupted by collage, record bar life, domestic violence,
erotic longings, the claustrophobic cubbyholes of cities and what's
left of nature's spaces. But his more profound subject is the
haunted interior life of late 20th century humanity. To knit up
the divide between the inner and outer life, Davis drenches his
narrative works in metaphor. He tempers his realism with expressionism,
composing beautifully colored paintings of a curious flatness.
And he forces ironic distance, reminding us of the artificiality
of art by putting tiny pictures on the walls of the room he paints,
and gluing preliminary sketches onto the sumptuous surface of
his oils.
"Pig Palace" is a small 1992 oil on paper that gives a dead-on take on the sleaze and alienation of bar life, a favorite Davis subject. This one, painted in fluent pink and gray, transforms the jaded barman into a pig. His customer, another blasé pig, dressed in a business suit, wearily leans on the bar. Hanging unnoticed above them are hanks of ham, carcasses on display at the proverbial sexual meat market of the bar. (A naked woman hovers to the right of the pigs.)
Animals have long been an important metaphorical motif for Davis, often standing in for our lower natures. (This show includes a painting of a wicked, regal baboon casually flaunting his genitals.) The witty pig painting recalls the greedy ruler pigs in George Orwell's Animal Farm, who, by book's end, were just as corrupt as the human dictators they had overturned. In "Gull Skull," a skull rendered with all the care of an anatomical illustration seems to float above a beach. Almost hidden, Breughel-like, in the background is a tiny couple reaching for each other in lust. The bird skull, like the Bible's whited sepulcher filled with dead men's bones, suggests corruption and death at the heart of their desire.
In this exhibition, where Davis shares space with Luis Jimenez and Judith Golden, Davis doesn't show any paintings as huge as those that so memorably dominated his Etherton show of a few seasons past. That's a bit of a disappointment, and so is the fact that some of the works here date back as far as 1984. But his "DNA Series" is brand-new. These are tiny, lushly painted works on paper filled by turns with cavorting monkeys and disconsolate women flung on wide, empty beds. And six medium-sized oils on canvas, particularly 1994's "Lobster Man" and "Lobster Woman," both beach scenes exploring sexual misconnections among a symbolic array of claws and bones, are classic Davises, rendered in glorious shades of purple, teal and orange.
Across the way is an exuberant collection of lithographs and etchings by erstwhile Tucsonan Luis Jimenez. Another nationally known artist, Jimenez has constructed public sculptures all around the country. The vigorous, sinuous rhythms of Jimenez's pieces, inspired by the delicious folk art of Mexico, further point up the elegant stillness of Davis' work.
A number of the Jimenez works were exhibited a few years ago at the Jesse Alonso Gallery, which has since decamped to the richer clime of Santa Fe. And some, "Denver Mustang," for instance, are really just sketches for sculptures. Still, there's a strong self-portrait, writ large and ominous, and a series of lively black-and-white etchings dissecting the themes of sex and death, with the help of the grinning skeletons of the Día de los Muertos.
Photographer Judith Golden, another UA prof, explores Mexican imagery quite differently from Jimenez in her elaborate color portraits of Oaxacan artists. Golden has used her technical wizardry to merge the artists and their works into single images. "Filipe Morales" doubles the artist into two men, a pair of profiles gazing at each other across a table, like saints on either side of an altar. "Justina Fuentes" is juxtaposed with a classical Mexican landscape, the jaggedy brown mountains behind her piercing a deep-blue night sky.
Like Davis, Golden is probing under the surface, trying to locate the psychological truth deep inside the person. But replicating as they do the stonelike texture of the ancient art of the pre-Columbian world, Golden's pieces, unlike Davis', suggest a long, even eternal, sweep of time. Full of the majesty of centuries, they're a counterpoint to Davis' pessimistic mal du siecle.
