Ian Davenport: Pathway | Cristea Roberts Gallery
This artist’s made a move from stripes to splotches, and I’m pleased to see it. Recently, Ian Davenport’s works have been based around bold vertical bands of colour. He let his bright acrylic paints drip down his aluminium surfaces, and let them pool and mingle interestingly at the bottom.
This latest collection of paintings and prints, on show now at Cristea Roberts, show a new direction.
Set Piece (2024)
This new direction is pictured above, in a three metre wide work on paper with the tongue in cheek title, Set Piece. Davenport made it by filling syringes with acrylic paint and shooting them at the canvas. These cumulative splotches share their bright solid colours with the old stripe paintings, but with an additional, bracing element of chaos.
Or, as the critic Alastair Sooke puts it in the show notes: “Regularity is opposed with rapture. Reason is set against ecstasy.” This change in direction, he’d likely argue, is towards the ecstatic.
To me though, in this enormous new painting, Davenport’s paint drips down like condensation on a window. Or maybe, like looking out of the window of a double decker bus on a rapidly-darkening, rainy autumn evening. Or maybe another viewer would see something else.
In other words, we all find our own pathways, after Davenport’s set us off.
Ian Davenport: Pathway is at Cristea Roberts Gallery (London). 13 September - 19 October 2024