Los Angeles the Unreal
by Eva Recinos
Noah Davis, Pueblo del Rio: Arabesque, 2014 is on view as part of the late artist's survey at the Hammer Museum. (Kerry McFate / Estate of Noah Davis, David Zwirner)
A sense of grief suffuses Noah Davis, the survey of the late Los Angeles painter, currently on view at the Hammer Museum. The exhibition is shaped by two major events: the opening of the Underground Museum in 2012, a community art space in Arlington Heights that Davis founded with his wife, the artist Karon Davis, and Davis’s death at 32. Both recall a deep sense of absence and loss: Davis died of a rare cancer in 2015, and the Underground Museum closed abruptly in 2022, in the middle of an exhibition of his work.
The museum clearly occupied an important focus for Davis; now, Los Angeles doesn’t have either of them. What remains is the lens Davis gifted us through his figurative paintings.
Noah Davis offers us a view through that lens, covering the arc of the artist’s career, from 2007 through 2015. The show points to his myriad sources of inspiration, from photographs culled at flea markets to reality television shows, but it is his singular vision of Los Angeles — my Los Angeles — that has stayed with me in the days since.
The Hammer Museum is presenting Noah Davis's first institutional survey. (Sarah Golonka)
The wall texts placed throughout the exhibition emphasize, in one way or another, how his work oscillates “between the real and the otherworldly.” In The Missing Link 1, 2013, for example, the fantastical collides with the everyday. The painting portrays a group of kids running around a mundane suburban lawn — a familiar sight, except for one kid levitating off the ground, arms outstretched.
Other works more specifically center Los Angeles and its complicated histories. One of Davis’s subjects was Pueblo del Rio Public Housing, an affordable housing complex designed by the celebrated Black architect Paul Revere Williams in the early 1950s, an idealistic Modernist project which later became a hotbed of gang activity. In Arabesque, 2014, Davis pairs the rows of Pueblo del Rio’s low-rise dwellings with rows of ballerinas poised on the grass before the buildings. The classic ballet pose captures the dancers kicking a leg up with ease. Here, everything is lush, everything is still. The sky is an impossible hue of purple-ish blue; maybe, it's about to rain. The moment may quickly pass. The ballerinas will soon disperse.
As a pre-teen, I took the bus often in South Central, and the scene looks like something I might have witnessed when looking out the window. In between glimpses of people waiting for a crosswalk light to change, as the Statue of Liberty flipped a sign for a nearby tax business, I might have seen these ballerinas.
Noah Davis at work in his Los Angeles studio in 2009. (Patrick O'Brien-Smith)
The idea of precious, silent moments appears again in works like The Missing Link 3, 2013, inspired by Davis’s deep appreciation of abstractionist Mark Rothko’s work. In the composition, we see a man in a stylish hat, framed by tall, looming buildings. A patch of sky and some greenery are visible in the distance. The buildings are composed of large blocks of color: deep purple, brown, and gray. Davis doesn’t give the figure any distinct features, allowing the viewer to fill in this information. I imagine him as one of the many commuters heading home during LA rush hour, tired from the day and eager to be home, the people often left out of glamorous images of the city: the women juggling multiple grocery store bags on their wrists as they board the bus, the men smoking cigarettes on their porches as the sun sets.
The curatorial text for The Missing Link 3 notes that during his drives through LA, “Davis liked to notice what he would call ‘hood Rothkos,’ city walls that had been graffitied and then painted over in solid blocks of color, their hazy edges resembling Rothko’s trembling geometries.” It’s significant that Davis linked a common and seemingly insignificant sight — paint over paint — to the work of a painter exalted in the modern art canon. A few days after seeing the show, I’m in the car at a red light on Arlington Avenue near my childhood home, and I see a partly buffed wall near a car wash. It takes me back to Davis’s work.
Noah Davis, Isis, 2009. (Kerry McFate / Estate of Noah Davis / David Zwirner)
A painting I stayed with longer than the others was Isis, 2009. A woman in a leotard stands in a yard before a wooden house holding two fans that are bright orange in hue. The color pools onto the floor, as if literally painting the ground beneath her. It’s a burst of brilliance interrupting an otherwise ordinary domestic space.
Davis often painted figures, but he didn’t really paint himself, though you can see his reflection in the window of the home. I stood there trying to discern his features. I thought maybe I could decipher the curve of an ear. Eventually, I stopped trying to look for the artist. Davis can be seen in how he portrayed the city, and that would have to be enough.
🎨🎨🎨
Noah Davis is on view at the Hammer Museum through Aug. 31; hammer.ucla.edu.
-2013.jpg?upscale=true&width=1200&upscale=true&name=01_Noah-Davis-1975-(8)-2013.jpg "A painting by Noah Davis shows a boy diving into a pool where other people are swimming")
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