Jay Davis (painter)
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Jay Davis (born 1975, Charleston, US) is an artist based in New York.
Davis studied on the New York Studio Program, AICAD (Association of Independent Colleges of Art and Design) [1] in 1996 and he received his BFA in 1997 from Ringling School of Art and Design [2] in Sarasota, Florida.
He has shown work in many exhibitions including the 1st Prague Biennial [3] at Veletrzni Palace, “Terra Non Firma” at Howard House Gallery [4] in Seattle, “I-Beam” at Cynthia Broan Gallery [5] in New York and “Stop and Store” at Luxe Gallery [6] in New York. He is represented by Mary Boone [7] in New York.
Jay Davis creates imaginary landscapes in acrylics on – usually – 4 by 5 foot vinyl ‘canvases’. Davis’s imagery has an otherworldly atmosphere thanks to his use of many shimmering layers of paint creating a lush, unreal surface. Davis does not seek to invent explicitly fantastic scenarios, as his diligently descriptive titles suggest - ‘Untitled (Brick House, Interior, Snow, Squares)’ or ‘Untitled (Plywood House, Inerior, Brown Object Going Through Colored Object)’, for example – but there is a playful sense of surreal composition. Davis’s paintings speak of the validity of abstraction as an aesthetic position; his minimal inclusion of overtly figurative elements and denial of narrative mean that his explanatory titles function to balance his flights into semi-nonfiguration and root his work in its solid origins in the real world. Davis’s work walks the fine line between representation and abstraction in a way that denies neither.
