Alan Davie at ACA - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

one time one of Britain's most famous beatniks, Alan Davie, 73 is now a doyen of British art. He was honored lately in Europe with a touring retrospective of his paintings. This novel York show, spanning his drawn out career but emphasizing recent works upon paper, was a modest American tribute to the Scottish-born painter, who is also an accomplished musician and poet

Davie first gained recognition in the late '40 and early '50 for providing Britain's answer to Abstract Expressionism. His work of that period links American Ab Ex and European tachiste painting. The present to view was weakest in representing this part of Davie's career, however. The small oils Snake Sensation (1959) and Dog organ of sights (1960) give a hint of his lively approach to the canvas or, rather, his attack upon it. Early on he used brilliant candy colors, like as the pink, lemon golden and cherry red of Smile of the Chameleon #1 (1967) There are traces of the influence of British artists like as Cecil Collins and especially Graham Sutherland, with whom Davie shares a penchant for centralized compositions, acidulous color schemes and totemic forms. on the contrary to get a sense of what Davie was all about in the first decades of his career individual has to see a really large work, and that, unfortunately, was what this exhibit lacked. For Davie was, above all, an action painter. Wild, sweeping brush-strokes and paint splashes overlay large canvases which were painted upon the floor a la Pollock

semens of an elaborate iconography are also set in the early works. Fanciful ideograms single outed from a wide variety of world agricultures were developed by Davie above the years into a highly refined visual collection of laws Since the early '70s, the artist has lived for part of each year upon the Caribbean island of St Lucia, where he has cultivated his delight in of Caribe petroglyphs as well as other non-Western tokens Eventually his use of these signs took priority over his more abstract, painterly action s In this exhibition, the evolution of his iconography was played without in the many stunning gouaches that made up the core of the display Symbols derived from Egyptian, Celtic, Hindu, Hopi, Caribe, African and Oceanic art are frequently intermixed. Although Davie's sign combination of parts to form a wholes seem to refer to religion, magic ritual or shamanism, they are not ever didactic, much less dogmatic. granting they may appear to count stories, there is no explicit narrative. He aims toward a personal visual poetry

In the greatest in quantity recent gouaches on view, similar as Double Mask (1991) and A novel Mask for P. (1991), Davie have the appearances to be simplifying his imagery. In the couple a brightly colored mask (a type of the human spirit), appears to ease on a table. The image, outlined in black, is center upon the paper and intricate networks of lines and circles are carefully painted in. The bravura brush-strokes of the early years are completely gone; these works exhibit a calm, methodical determination. on the other hand they have the same warm, meditative be incandescent that radiates in varying stages from every Davie painting.

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