SANTA FE, NM.- The Polar Series, an exhibition of new paintings by Ronald Davis will open at Charlotte Jackson Fine Art on March 6 and extend through March 31. An Opening Reception will be held on Friday, March 6 from 5-7 p.m. A Gallery Talk, "A Conversation, Remembering Ron Davis," with guest panelists Ron Cooper, Jim Grant, and Gary Wong will be held on Saturday, March 7 from 2-4 p.m. The gallery is in the Railyard Arts District at 554 South Guadalupe Street.

These discs of brilliant and confounding color are alluringly tactile. There is an itch in the palm, a desire to smooth one's hand over the curved edges of the tondos, across their abstract, colorful geometries. The rounded edges and glossy surfaces underscore the lived experience of Ronald Davis’s last series of work, The Polar Series, as objects rather than, in a more classical and rarified sense, paintings. Mounted atop diamond shaped canvases, the inner tondos tug at the viewer, zeroing one's vision center-ward with their bullseye-like attraction.

Charlotte Jackson Fine Art is honored to present a selection of pieces from Ronald Davis's final body of work, The Polar Series, including the very last painting that Davis completed a few days before his death, Timer.

We tend to freight last's (words, books, works) with an especial level of meaning that might not always be warranted. However, it is difficult to look at Timer and not see a sort of cipher, a work of art where all of Davis's accumulated insights, tools, and affinities are on display. With its alternating stripes of blue and orange to one side, green and orange to the other, the piece is split by a wider, bifurcated band between them. In this off-center band a very Ronald Davis brand of illusion comes into play - using nested shapes and color value in the lower portion to create the impression of depth, where blues deepen to dark blue-green, and using classical two-point perspective above to create a sort of doorway of red onto a vista of green. Set strikingly against its black diamond background, the whole is composed of opposites coming into and out of balance.

The Polar Series is the result of a return to painting by Davis beginning in June of 2021. At that point he had not painted on canvas for about 15 years, focused instead primarily on his computer-generated Pixel Dust works. Davis's initial foray with a rectangular format quickly shifted when, as he says, "as I worked, the desire to “find the center” became my mission." He drew inspiration from a 1963 tondo, Target, which with its alternate-colored, light and dark bullseye seemed an apt format to explore, as he puts it, the "opposite poles of light-dark, black-white, up-down."

Davis holds an important space in the history of art in the 20th century with his perception-bending use of perspective and exploration of cutting-edge technologies. His use of perspective to "excavate walls" ran contrary to the post-modernist predilection for emphasizing the flatness of the two-dimensional painting surface. However, as Davis said in a quote from the 1980's, via art writer Penny Hawks: "I embrace the traditions of 20th century abstract painting. In fact, I have always remained in the Clement Greenberg dialogue of post-painterly abstraction. I have also been influenced by minimalism. But the emptiness of classical minimalism was never enough for me, nor were Clem’s theatrical axioms. I had to make it beautiful."

The use of a second, diamond canvas to "frame" the inner tondos of the Polar Series seems, at first, almost to undercut the very work that Davis did as part of the post-modern project to unhook painting from its formal framing. But in fact, as Davis himself noted, these mountings manage, with an almost humorous, Duchampian eye-wink, to widen that gap. As he says, "I mounted the circles on square backings tipped 45 degrees as diamonds, to better define their objecthood...".

This choice is itself a part of the complex interweaving of paradoxes that run throughout The Polar Series. Warm versus cool, high energy versus low energy, flat versus deep, curved versus squared. These opposites interact, war, and at times resolve within each piece. These works seem ultimately to be as much about the science and experience of human perceptions as they are about the history and technology of art-making. This is the multifaceted and unsettled truth of human life, the realm of experience that the poet Keats dubbed "negative capability." And yet what these paintings do is take that richness of seeming conflict and irresolution and to refine it. To unfold the convoluted not by solving it, but by illuminating it. Here is, perhaps, where that "beauty" Davis strived for arises. As David Hickey so aptly put it in his essay, "Ronald Davis Is Not Doing What You're Seeing" from 2015: "The idea is not to seduce but to render something complex plain."

This, more than anything, when combined with another quote from Ronald Davis, seems to form the perfect cipher and epitaph for Davis's body of work, and in particular the pieces presented here in The Polar Series. "I am but a box in time and space. I am content to become one with the cosmos."

For More Information:

Charlotte Jackson Fine Art
554 South Guadalupe
Santa Fe, NM 87501
505-989-8688
fax 505-989-9898