Paul Davies has come a long way from the kid at his grandparents’ house copying pictures from an Asterix cartoon book. “I loved the colours and simplicity of the images,” says Davies, a comment that wouldn’t be amiss after viewing his artworks. But what on first glance may look like simplicity, is actually a considered art practice that combines photographs, hand-cut stencils, painting and careful composition to highlight opposites at play. “My work is driven by friction between opposing forces of built and natural environments, design and art, abstraction and figuration.” We chat to Davies about his new exhibition ‘Other Desert Spaces’ and the direction his move to Los Angeles has steered his work.
What sparked your interest in architecture?
Since I was a kid I was never interested in drawing people and preferred sketching objects or things, such as album covers with cool 3D fonts like Metallica’s ‘Ride the Lightning’. I also studied sculpture at college, which together with the site-specific “urbanness” of street and graffiti art I was exposed to at my Sydney studio (China Heights) combined to form an interest in the built environment.
You have a love of mid-century architecture, what appeals about it?
I’m interested in this era of surveillance and linking it with neutral facades of mid-century architecture repeated and collaged to blur what is revealed and concealed.
Does nostalgia play an important role in your art?
The intention is to present the viewer with a rational image, which may appear nostalgic through palate and subject matter. However, in reality it is an amalgam of elements, in this case individual stencils that combine to create a scene. I think of the stencils as a set of tarot cards that can be reshuffled to create ever-changing combinations of scenes and therefore, like the idea of a house of cards, the nostalgic image can fall apart when the process is revealed.
How did the graphic nature of your work come about?
It evolved through a combination of hanging around street and graffiti artists at my studio in Sydney, and an interest in constructivist art, which I discovered at college, and the way it was used to brand movements like the Russian revolution.
Which direction does this exhibition take your work?
In this exhibition the stencil, a tool central to my practice, was repurposed from figurative perspective with a definite orientation, to deconstructed semi-abstract backdrops. This method attempts to draw a comparison between the stenciled silhouettes as formal elements in the paintings’ composition, and the open plan spaces of modern functionalist living. These elements move in and out of one another to collapse the space the stencil is intended to portray.
How has living in Los Angeles influenced your work?
One example is a new series of site-specific photograms, which illustrate a tension between neutrality and personal experience, created in Topanga, California. A cultural hippie Mecca, Topanga, has attracted the likes of Dennis Hopper, through to Jim Morrison and it was there that Neil Young recorded much of ‘After the Gold Rush’.
In a comment on this notion of place and its projected image, the work One hour of Solstice sunlight, as seven repeated mountain landscapes, recorded direct sunlight onto photosensitive painted paper, through a stencil that I hand cut from my own digital photograph. The series depicts a mountain range reduced to a stencil, that implies an icon or thumbnail of itself, laid on hand-painted pieces of paper, to capture one hour at Solstice. The process looks at the friction between the stencil as a tool by which to document a unique moment and the inherent ambiguity of the device, illustrated through the repetition of content.
Olsen Irwin
7 to 25 October, 2015
Sydney
House Mountains Pools, 2015, vinyl acrylic copolymer on canvas, 153 x 122cm
House Forest, 2015, blue vinyl acrylic copolymer on canvas, 153 x 122cm
Courtesy the artist and Olsen Irwin, Sydney
