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Sunday 16 February

Noah Davis: The Painter of Invisible Truths

Published on: 26 January 2025

By: Hervé Lancelin

Category: Art review

Reading time: 8 minutes

Noah Davis’s works transform African-American daily life into timeless moments. His unique technique, blending realism and dreamlike elements, creates scenes where the ordinary becomes extraordinary, brought to life by a twilight palette that lends his figures a striking spectral presence.

Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs, it’s high time we talk about an artist who shook our certainties like a Molotov cocktail thrown into a high-society vernissage. Noah Davis (1983-2015) wasn’t one to play by the rules of the artistic establishment. At only 32 years old, this meteor of contemporary painting left us, but not before redefining our vision of African American art with an audacity that would make Basquiat himself pale. His meteoric journey, from the streets of Seattle to the most prestigious galleries, testifies to a raw talent that needed only eight years to leave its indelible mark on art history.

In his canvases, Davis juggled reality and the dreamlike like a magician on acid, creating a pictorial universe where everyday banality transforms into moments of eternity. His technique is as sharp as a philosophical scalpel: figures emerging from misty backgrounds like specters of our collective consciousness, their faces often blurred or partially erased, challenging us in their existential vulnerability. His palette, dominated by twilight purples and nocturnal blues, creates an atmosphere that oscillates between the tangible and the dream, as if we were stuck in that in-between world that Walter Benjamin called “now-time”. This technical mastery isn’t just a simple exercise in style; it serves a deeper purpose that runs through all his work: the representation of African American life in its daily complexity, far from media clichés and stereotypes.

Take “Pueblo del Rio: Concerto” (2014), where a solitary pianist plays a surrealist concerto in front of social housing. This scene, bathed in Los Angeles’ typical purplish twilight light, strangely reminds us of Plato’s cave. But instead of showing us shadows projected on a wall, Davis forces us to confront our own perception of social reality. The pianist, a solitary figure in a deserted urban landscape, becomes Plato’s philosopher-king, the one who has seen truth and tries to share it with those still chained in their mental cave. The modernist architecture of the social housing, designed by Paul Williams, the first African American member of the American Institute of Architects, serves as a backdrop for this meditation on art, culture, and society. Davis doesn’t just represent reality; he transcends it, creating a space where classical music and modernist architecture naturally coexist with the African American experience.

This philosophical approach is also found in “40 Acres and a Unicorn” (2007), where Davis pulverizes our expectations with the subtlety of an elephant in a china shop. The title references the unfulfilled promise by the American government to give “40 acres and a mule” to freed slaves. By replacing the mule with a unicorn, Davis doesn’t just create a visual metaphor for this broken promise; he plunges us into a deep reflection on the Hegelian concept of recognition. As Hegel explained in his “Phenomenology of Spirit”, self-consciousness can only emerge through mutual recognition. The black rider, mounted on his mythical steed, stands out against an abyssal black background, creating an image that oscillates between fairy tale and biting social commentary. The unicorn, a quintessential Western symbol, is here reappropriated and transformed into a vehicle for devastating social criticism.

The “1975” series (2013) perfectly illustrates Davis’s ability to transmute the everyday into pictorial gold. Based on photographs taken by his mother when she was in high school, this series of nine paintings captures urban life in a black neighborhood with remarkable tenderness and acuity. The mundane scenes – children playing, adults talking, leisure moments by a pool – are rendered in a washed-out palette that gives them a timeless quality. Davis superimposes layers of paint like strata of collective memory. The figures seem to float between past and present, creating what philosopher Jacques Derrida called “différance”, this constant play between presence and absence that characterizes all representation.

In “The Last Barbeque” (2008), Davis transforms an ordinary family barbecue into a deep meditation on community and collective memory. Three figures stand near a grill, while a ghostly trio emerges from a bush, creating a palpable tension between the world of the living and that of the ancestors. This work echoes the conception of cyclical time in traditional African thought, where the dead continue to interact with the living. But Davis doesn’t just reproduce these traditions; he reinvents them in a contemporary context, creating a new urban mythology that draws as much from Western art history as from the African American experience.

This constant dialogue between tradition and modernity, between personal and political, finds its most poignant expression in “Painting for My Dad” (2011), created shortly before his father’s death. A solitary figure contemplates a starry horizon, holding a lantern reminiscent of Diogenes searching for an honest man. But unlike the Greek cynic, Davis’s character isn’t seeking honesty in the outside world; he finds it in introspection and connection with his roots. The darkness enveloping the figure isn’t threatening but protective, like a cocoon of melancholy that preserves the memory of loved ones.

Davis’s painting technique evolves throughout his career, but certain constants remain. His masterful use of washes and drips creates complex pictorial surfaces that seem to breathe, vibrate before our eyes. Figures emerge from these backgrounds like apparitions, sometimes barely sketched, sometimes rendered with photographic precision. This tension between abstraction and figuration recalls the work of Marlene Dumas or Luc Tuymans, but Davis adds an extra dimension by anchoring it in the African American experience. His painting thus becomes an act of cultural resistance, a way of claiming his place in Western art history while creating something radically new.

The creation of The Underground Museum in 2012, with his wife Karon Davis, represents the logical extension of this artistic vision. By transforming a series of abandoned storefronts in Arlington Heights into a vibrant cultural space, Davis created what philosopher Henri Lefebvre called a “differential space”, a place that escapes dominant market logic to create new forms of sociality. The museum, located in a predominantly African American and Latino neighborhood, isn’t just a simple exhibition space: it’s a true social laboratory where art becomes the catalyst for community transformation. The exhibitions mix works by recognized and emerging artists, creating unexpected dialogues that question traditional hierarchies in the art world.

The last period of his work, as he battled the cancer that would take him, reveals an even greater intensity. In works like “Untitled” (2015), where two women rest on a couch while an enigmatic white form hovers above them, one senses a new urgency. The colors become more muted, the figures more spectral, as if Davis were trying to capture the very essence of existence before it escaped him. These late works evoke the Heideggerian conception of being-toward-death, where consciousness of our finitude becomes the catalyst for authentic existence. The white form dominating the composition could be interpreted as a manifestation of this acute awareness of mortality, but also as a symbol of hope and transcendence.

This tension between the earthly and the spiritual runs through all of Davis’s work. In “Man with Alien and Shotgun” (2008), an apparently banal hunting scene is transformed into a close encounter of the third kind, creating a subtle commentary on otherness and exclusion. The hunter and his alien prey become a metaphor for the complex relationship between dominant and dominated, between “us” and “them”. But Davis refuses simplistic readings: the alien, with its strange shape and gray color, could just as well be a projection of the hunter’s fears and desires as a real extraterrestrial creature.

Davis’s palette, often described as “crepuscular”, creates unique atmospheres that transform the most ordinary scenes into moments of sublime strangeness. The deep purples, nocturnal blues, and pearly grays that dominate his compositions aren’t just aesthetic choices: they create a pictorial space where real and imaginary merge. This use of color recalls Wassily Kandinsky’s theories about correspondences between colors and emotions, but Davis reinvents them in a contemporary context, creating what philosopher Gilles Deleuze would call “blocks of sensation”.

Davis’s influence on the new generation of artists is already perceptible. His ability to navigate between different registers – from social realism to surrealist fantasy – while maintaining remarkable stylistic coherence, has opened new possibilities for contemporary painting. His work shows that it’s possible to create art deeply rooted in a specific experience while achieving universal scope. The question of representing black bodies in art, central to his work, continues to inspire many contemporary artists who seek to deconstruct racial stereotypes while celebrating the beauty and complexity of the African American experience.

Davis uses painting as Nietzsche used the hammer, to sound out the hollow idols of our time. His paintings aren’t simple representations; they’re acts of cultural resistance that question our assumptions about art, race, and identity. In an art world obsessed with trends and market values, Davis reminds us that art’s true value lies in its ability to transform our vision of the world and create spaces of freedom and resistance. His work remains a powerful testament to the possibility of creating art that is both deeply personal and universally relevant, technically sophisticated and socially engaged.

Davis’s legacy is twofold: on one hand, a body of work that continues to challenge us through its beauty and conceptual depth; on the other, a model of artistic engagement that shows how art can be a vector for social transformation. The Underground Museum, although having closed its doors in 2022, has inspired numerous similar initiatives across the country, proving that Davis’s vision of art accessible to all wasn’t utopian. As he himself said, his goal was to “show Black people in normal situations, where drugs and guns have nothing to do with it”. This simple statement hides a revolutionary ambition: to normalize the representation of African American life in all its richness and complexity.

Davis transforms this seemingly simple mission into a profound exploration of the human condition. Each painting is a window open to a world both familiar and strange, where the everyday mingles with the mythological, where the personal becomes political without ever falling into didacticism. His work reminds us that true art isn’t about reproducing the visible, but making visible the invisible, as Paul Klee said. And in this process, Davis created a new form of beauty that continues to haunt and inspire us, reminding us that the most powerful art is that which forces us to see the world – and ourselves – with fresh eyes.

Reference(s)

Noah DAVIS (1983-2015)
First name: Noah
Last name: DAVIS
Gender: Male
Nationalitie(s):

  • United States of America

Age: 32 years old (2015)

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