Dreams of yesterday,
memories of tomorrow

Dr Jon Wood (Henry Moore Institute, Leeds) 2005

*Please note: I intend in due course to add images for all of the paintings mentioned here. For now, you’ll just have to imagine how fantastic they are.

Dinosaurs roam the swamplands of a ruined modernist city. Robots look with their pet dogs for firewood in a geometric no mans land of a cactus forest. The beagle has slandered, wolf man wears Casio F-91W and we are greeted by Geometron.

If you have ever asked yourself how you are going to get through the day’s work or how you could possibly survive an apocalypse even, Andrew Davies’ paintings might well be for you. Davies, however, is not an artist to blast you with sensational visions of hell on earth (or anywhere else for that matter). You won’t find any blood, sex and death-thirsty panoramas, rather a series of stunningly well crafted tales of recuperation: impossible comic moments of human (and extraterrestrial) tenderness, intimacy and generosity of spirit played out within a cartoon post-Armageddon landscape. Witty and ambivalent cartoon denials of nihilism and futility, you might say, set in malign-benign realms. Davies is clearly fascinated by how we imaginatively cope with things (how we have to learn to walk before we can run), as well as how we have coped in the past and how we might perhaps in the forthcoming. Dreams of yesterday, memories of tomorrow, his paintings are, in a sense, ‘thoughts for the day’ through a playful, well-studied visual iconography of a futuristic past.

One of key reasons that Davies’ art has such charm is that he has decided to let his imagination do its work with paint on canvas. He could, of course, make computer graphics, posters or prints, but has gone for a more layered, textured and surface-conscious approach for his image making and story telling. He constructs his paintings layer by layer, reworking and re-bordering the outlines and sections as they take gradually shape. He also builds upon this by using the edges and sides of canvas itself—painting on the side of it and folding, stretching and continuing the narrative around the support. This gives the paintings an object-ness that sets them out and apart from the physical and vertical support of the walls upon which they are hung. It is also a strategy for implicating the viewers’ eyes and imaginations, heightening their curiosity and encouraging them to look and think beyond the back of things and to not take things at face value. Ambiguity is thus well built into the painting from the outset and the question ‘what then are we really looking at’ haunts much of his work.

Davies’ work at the moment seems broadly to fall into two genres: narratives (condensed within both single works, like ‘The Second Coming’, and extended across a group works, like ‘The Reading of the Will’) and what one might call 'image statements’— logos, slogans and other sound bites. For the latter, typographic turns of phrase are appropriated, twisted and returned as pictures. House of Horror meets House of Fraser mediated by ‘I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out of Here’ in his ‘House of Hair’. ‘Sea Hag’ reminds of us of his interest in words that go so well together by accident: Sea Horse meets Fag Hag in and amongst the bubbling seaweed. ‘Go to Hell’ gives us a sales graph spiraling downwards out of control, but meeting 70s design, giving up a retro-playful, but also a deeply serious hatred of the corporate and commercial world of sales and targets.

Davies’ more narrative paintings take these moods and moments further, playing them out with a range of characters and urban and rural environments. Chris Ware’s influence, particularly in his ability to focus in on an overlooked gesture or action within a banal, but overwhelming architectural setting, is noticeable here but is also well considered and absorbed. What is also striking about Davies’ paintings is how subtly he places himself in and amongst them. He is, on one level, of course the storyteller of these tales - unreliably giving us the gist of things and hinting at unresolved endings and outcomes. There is an interesting quality here since there is as much self-portraiture and autobiography in these works as there is self-effacement: Davies standing, well-placed, as both as the ‘artist-witness’ and a ‘fictional protagonist’ playfully trapped within many of his own paintings. It will be interestingly to see how this dynamic changes in the work to come. Perhaps, as his recent and remarkable canvas ‘60 x 30’ suggests, he might lean towards the former, and let the framing itself— and the implicit depth of view and point of view— tell more of the story from beyond the canvas.