FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Ronald Davis: “A Painting’s Just Gotta Look Better than the Wallpaper”
February 5 thru March, 2005
Advance preview: February 4, 10am-6pm
Galerie Dionisi
8906 Melrose Ave., West Hollywood, CA 90069
(310) 273-2334
E-mail, <galeriedionisi@sbcglobal.net>
Hours, Monday – Friday, 10am-6pm; Saturday, 11am-5pm
Ronald Davis, (l.) Extension Cube, 1974. Cel-Vinyl acrylic and dry pigment on canvas. 87 x 103 inches.
Ronald David, (r.) Crimson-Dark Horizon, 2002. Acrylic on PVC. 59.5 x 47.25 x 4.25 inches.
RONALD DAVIS RETURNS TO LA
“My work is comprised of aggressively decorative, meaningless, unidentified floating objects that pretend to be rational. Illusion is my vehicle. Opticality is paramount.”
--From Ronald Davis: Forty Years of Abstraction, The Butler Institute of American Art, 2002
In 1993 Ronald Davis sold his Malibu house/studio and moved to Arroyo Hondo, a fairly remote area outside of Taos, where he built a residence and studio in the manner of a Navajo hogan. While he continues to work and exhibit (primarily in museums) his paintings have rarely been seen in the galleries since his departure. Therefore, we are pleased to re-introduce Ronald Davis to the LA area after more than a decade away from the critical limelight.
To that end, Galerie Dionisi will exhibit several paintings representing many of Davis’s various series from the 1970s to the present. This small but instructive exhibition reveals the artist’s movement from abstract expressionism through his years with Nicholas Wilder, Tibor de Nagy, Leo Castelli and beyond; from minimalist geometric shaped paintings in colored polyester resins and fiberglass (which Barbara Rose, Hilton Kramer, Michael Fried and others have called “Abstract Illusionism” after the apparent paradoxical confluence of Renaissance perspective and abstract surface flatness in the work) to a return to abstract expressionist painting in the Music Series.
Of special note are two seminal works rarely seen, Extension Cube, 1974 and Crimson-Dark Horizon, 2002 which seem to circumscribe Davis’s aesthetic experiments of the last four decades.
