Rob Davis: The Golden

Broadway is pleased to announce The Golden a solo presentation of new paintings by New York-based artist Rob Davis.

These modestly scaled oil on linen works take depopulated 1970s and 80s domestic interiors and culturally-charged objects as their subject.  While initially apprehended as a mode of photorealism, prolonged viewing reveals a gauzier, mediated affect that hints at a more considered approach. Painting from photographs (with an intermediary study in watercolor) Davis evokes a peculiar vestige of the source image rather than a mere virtuosic reproduction. In doing so, he homes in on the slippery complexities of individual and shared memory.

The beckoning interior of a pick-up truck, a shark-skinned Cadillac Eldorado (that gives the show its title), a wall-mounted telephone on faux-wood paneling, and a backyard tire swing all conjure a certain vintage of American middle-class signifiers, but with a suggestive twist. These images harbor an extraordinary potential energy that something is about to happen—and gets at an unsettling underbelly of the era and nullifies nostalgia. The tire swing, for example, traces an arc between innocent play and the specter of something more malignant, acknowledging a diffuse dust of unease that has settled on everything.

Elsewhere, Davis engages some curious strategies around reproduction. With Quilt 1-3 and Window 1 and 2 (all works 2024) the artist repeats views of a suburban bedroom in multiple iterations identical in size and only subtly varied in appearance. This has the peculiar effect of calling to mind both the ready reproducibility of the source image and the tremendous effort undertaken to render it by hand. Seriality generally favors the immediacy of the photograph, but for Davis all reminiscence is muscle memory and these paintings carry the imprint of his labor as a potent lever for narrative and remembrance.