PAUL DAVIES

For Davies, place is a fluid, many faceted thing. It’s not just a geographical location, it’s the people within it, what they build, what they bring, all the diversity of their many different histories, fantasies, ambitions and desires. Each is a point in a vast, shifting network of individual connections, branching out and connecting to more, ever onward to infinity. This is what lies at the heart of his practice.

Commonalities appeal to the artist, the things that suggest culture and lifestyle are imported and exported, whether it be New South Wales, California, or Queensland. Davies is known for being a prominent figure in the Los Angeles art scene from 2014 to 2019, and more recently Sydney. He now brings his unique retinal sensibility and passion for form to Aotearoa New Zealand for Still Frame, with six paintings of the Queenstown and Central Otago area.

Davies’ Matisse-like pastel palette is drawn from the history of maps and block colour printing. Each painting is full of light and plays with the ephemerality of memory and perception bordering on the abstract. Davies is a flâneur, vibing with his environment in an observer–participant dialectic. He is navigating and exploring with technology, feeling, whatever catches his attention, and his artistic technique and sensibility.

Pop and Op art sensibilities also make an appearance. The artifice of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, and the colour contrasts and chromatic vibration of Bridget Riley and Victor Vasarely. From Analytical Cubism he takes the deconstruction of perspective, so that you feel less like you are looking at a painting and more like you are moving through a space, viewing everything from multiple aspects. This is never without a touch of irony, Davies is nothing if not self-aware.

Increasingly Davies’ work responds to the fraught dialogue around the impersonal nature of disposable digital images saturating media and the rise of AI. He applies his intuition to the algorithmic logic of their painterly construction in the same way a lot of people use social media filters and image manipulation software to construct their experiences and memories.

The artist interrogates that synthetic aesthetic, subverting it with his painstaking handmade construction. By filtering the visuals through his own layers of memory and emotional response, he reinvests it with humanity. Nonetheless each painting remains open to interpretation and reinterpretation by the viewer. The artist sets no rules as to how we see, he’s just holding up a window... or a mirror...

His work can be found in important public collections in the US and Australia, including the J. Paul Getty Museum, Palm Springs Art Museum, Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, University of California Irvine Institute and Museum for California Art, Art Gallery of Ballarat, Macquarie University, Museum of Brisbane, and Bond University. Davies has completed residencies at the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture in Arizona, the The Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, and Artspace in Sydney Australia.