Art Gallery Archive

The Caestecker Gallery at Ripon College is pleased to present “More Scenes from Our Addiction to Fictions,”  a show of new and recent paintings by Michael Davidson. In this series of work, Davidson uses the notion of an ongoing and unfinished conceptual opera as a framework to question and consider our need and desire to make paint make sense.

Stacking influences and ideas from incredibly diverse sources, Davidson interrogates his watercolors. This excavation is done through techniques of addition and subtraction, through a variety of means of imparting colored viscous fluids to a flat surface- both direct and indirect. This process often involves forays from analog to digital and back to explore possibilities and assist a given work’s often circuitous investigation.

Imagined as scenes, transitions, sets, and singular moments in an epic and ongoing fictional theatrical production, Davidson’s paintings operate between the specific and the obscure. The veils of paint form a scaffolding of convincingness and a sensual believable landscape. Yet, simultaneously, these are paintings whose symphonic curiosity constantly flirts with incessantly questioning doubt. These paintings amplify the role of the artist as conjurer of both the real and the elusive. “Art is a critically important refuge for mystery, art gives mystery a place to live.”