Review: Karin Davie’s Perfect Heritage
Karin Davie’s show of recent work is a lively collection of ambitious paintings full of painterly bravado. Davie’s energetic gestural abstractions make a gorgeous contribution to the historical project of painting, and are surprisingly evocative of painting from the dawn of the endeavor.Viewing the work, I was reminded of my first trip to Italy as a young art student. In the Botticelli Room of the Uffizi museum in Florence, surrounded by such giants as the Birth of Venus, Primavera, and the famous Centaur, hangs Domenico Ghirlandaio’s work from 1484, Madonna Enthroned with Angels and Saints. Following a familiar theme, it depicts a group of figures worshipping the Christ child on his mother’s lap, with kneeling portraits of two patrons in the foreground. The painting is a masterpiece. About six feet square, every inch is bejeweled in stunning detail. Figures, drapery, flora, and every other minute feature are portrayed with both grace and naturalism. The thousand parts form a whole, miraculously fusing into a picture of completeness through complexity.
Standing in front of that painting for the first time, I had the clear impression that it was somehow a perfect painting. Upon reflection, I think its perfection is neither the sort that excludes other possibilities nor the dubious sort that purports to embody a culmination of history. This painting is perfect in the sense that it lays out in clear terms what its intention is, and by what means it will be accomplished, and then it proceeds with unflinching rigor to the end. It is at once exulting and shattering, and for me, unforgettable.
One of the finest works in Davie’s exhibit is the large Between My Eye and Heart No. 18 (2005). Long, unbroken brushstrokes of rich purple, fleshy peach, pink, and lush green squirm and pulse over a deep field of grey-blue. The relationship of the work to renaissance painting is not dependant on the superficial chromatic similarity that some of the images bears to that period, though it deserves mention that her use of color is admirable. Rather, the work’s classical qualities begin with its command of the depth of pictorial space, its delicate balance of material indulgence and pious control, and its pursuit of the most sublime beauty in its natural haunt, just on the edge of ugliness. Davie’s is perfect painting, her parameters are clear, and she accomplishes her objectives with unimpeachable skill and remarkable poetry in a way that I believe Ghirlandaio would applaud. Achieving all this by means of her own bold, idiosyncratic brushwork enriches the world of painting. It is a pleasure to see such work while the paint is still drying.
Karin Davie was at the Mary Boone Gallery in Chelsea, 30 April - 25 June 2005.
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