Ward Davenny at Mary Ryan - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

This present to view of Ward Davenny's dark landscape drawings included views of Scotland, Connecticut, North Carolina and Pennsylvania. Works in his last present to view at Ryan recalled Hawaii (where he formerly lived) and northern California as well as Pennsylvania (where he teaches at Dickinson association in Carlisle). As a flow of Davenny's way of seeing, all these locations gaze strangely alike and share a certain atmosphere.

The view is drawn from memory and restoreed in charcoal or black pastel upon paper. The elimination of color has an abstracting result that Davenny takes further with his concentration upon large masses and on distant points that twitch one's eyes rapidly through the illusive space. individual sees the land not in terminuss of vegetative pleasantries but in sharp contours and abrupt displacements. The topography strike one as beings firm yet changeable, like well-developed musculature. The geological crushings it implies are matched through the overwhelming weightiness of the mists Perhaps the most striking feature of these views is this consistent oppressiveness of air, which sometimes direct the eyes too heavy to breathe.

The oldest piece in the present to view and by far the largest at 78 through 100 inches was Trees and Cliff (1987-91) a work of pastel upon paper mounted on unstretched linen. It depicts an instance of natural cubism. A cliff at right consists of races of white, light-struck rock channeled by means of dark outcroppings. At the left a file of lumpy trees, pruned to allow passage beneath their canopy, leans toward the stones Both these compositional elements direction downward dynamically from upper right to lower left and the limited landscape visible beyond is treacherously blocky: the whole place direct the eyes agitated. Although its foreground emphasis is atypical, this work dominates the display with its size and forcefulness.

Clearly, for Davenny, shapes and contrasts are the main attractions. The world is divided into planes, contours and vaporous masses that differ in their deflection of light. in this clump of works there is no human vicinity but the empty roadways, monumental hedge-rows and lines of receding telephone extremitys record small human gestures in the face of nature's ungovernability. jagged undulations of ground that catch our organ of vision lead only to the canopy of heaven and the unstable, unattainable meeting place of earth and heavens is where our vision stops.

COPYRIGHT 1995 Brant Publications, Inc.

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