Pattern and Decoration
Ornament as Promise

BRAD DAVIS

A course in Chinese painting, which Brad Davis took while studying at Hunter College in New York in the late 1960s, left a lasting impression on him. It marks the start of what was to become a lifelong preoccupation with Asian fine arts from motifs to compositional principles to the brushstroke which was to also prove influential for other artists in the Pattern and Decoration move-ment. Admittedly, Davis's early artistic ventures appear martial: the lyrical, abstract grounds teem with swastikas, eagles, daggers, explosions, suggesting repression and violence. Around 1975— the year Pattern and Decoration first took shape-Davis was inspired by the teachings of the Indian yogi Muktananda to apply himself to a more lyrical world: portrayals of plants and landscapes now began to predominate in his work. In this context, The Garden is of note: the installation, realized in collaboration with Ned Smyth at the Holly Solomon Gallery in 1977, includes paintings by the artist that simulate views of several (Oriental) gardens.

Animal motifs-dogs, birds, monkeys gained in importance rom the late 19/Os on, and Davis framed them with conspicuously patterned polyesters, sometimes with a dual trim. A trip to India and an enduring absorption in Persian and Indian miniatures are notable influences. For subject matter, too, the artist draws on Indian mythology in which animals often symbolize human characteristics. For instance, the stylized portrayal of two dogs in Shiva's Dogs I (1979) refers to the Hindu god Shiva and his four-legged companions; the latter stand among other things for territorial attitudes (undesirable in Hinduism) and (self-) protection.

There's an occasional splash of the red of the decorative floral border in Davis's image- he often coordinates the colors of the content and the trim-while the dogs are rendered with such linear clarity as to be arabesques themselves: they are embedded in a pictorial space that is not so much illusionistic as ornamental.

Davis's interest in painterly depictions of movement and flow— and hence in dispelling fixed concepts of form and space is evinced particularly by the water motif found in many of his images (Night Cry, 1979); and, likewise, by the "omnidirectional" tondo, a form of support the artist used, in particular from the early 1980s on, to portray different times of day, for instance, or the changing seasons (All Seasons, 1980). Besides the gestural ductus and dynamic pictorial surfaces, the Fauvist use of color is characteristic of every phase of Davis's oeuvre, and it consistently lends a factitious or dreamlike quality even to his representations of nature. Thus Davis numbers among those "figurative" Pattern and Decoration artists who enjoy transferring the principles of ornament-flatness, momentum, artificiality-to metaphorical motives and narrative contexts. / Manuela Ammer