The seductive appeal of houses – modernist houses – is at the heart of artist Paul Davies’ work. In his paintings he seeks to evoke “the shape of a place, what it may feel like to walk through it, rather than an image from a single point perspective”.
Yet in these images the buildings are also dwarfed in scale and significance by surrounding forest, as though reflecting humanity’s relatively minor status within the broader natural environment.
They are constructed using stencilled photographs of many places, to bring together the image of one fictional building which is painstakingly layered with paint onto canvas. They combine images, according to Davies, to “mirror the way we modify images to construct our recollections”.
Modernist architecture is always central. Davies spent almost six years in Los Angeles (2014-19), where this style of building is common but, in this exhibition, most of the built imagery is drawn from Queensland’s Sunshine Coast, where he and his family waited out the pandemic between 2019 and 2021 before returning to Sydney. In Queensland he was struck by the similarities between LA and our region – both are sprawling, growing urban areas with long coastlines where he found himself “in the car a lot”.
Memory Lens is his inaugural exhibition at Jan Murphy Gallery. It is significant because he has segued from depicting buildings that are generic, abstracted representations of modernism, to focus, in three works (Untitled 1, 9, 10), on a particular house by Brisbane-based architect Stuart Vokes.
“This place has a strong emotional connection for me,” Davies says. “During our time there we saw the house, which was built off-site, craned onto a beach dune with surrounding scrub at Peregian Beach. We lived with extended family in its beautiful open spaces. I made two exhibitions downstairs in the living area, which I was able to use as a studio.”
Modernism was a revolutionary mid-19th century movement that changed relationships to both materials and the past. It rejected decorative traditions, promoted freedom of expression and celebrated the technological and social advancements of that era.
Davies celebrates those advances however, in this work, he is also thinking through the current rise of artificial intelligence and the increasing digital experiences available to us.
“On initial observation, the paintings in this exhibition could easily be read as instructions given to an AI app – a modernist house nestled in a picturesque landscape, adorned with chairs, a captivating sunset casting palm tree reflections upon the curves of a kidney-shaped swimming pool. However, on closer inspection, they reveal their true nature as intricate handmade paintings that hold profound personal significance.”
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Framed within the broader paintings are vignettes, using changes in perspective and shifts in focus to highlight their constructed nature. In Untitled 11, a house appears amidst a forest that brings night colours (blue, black and white) to a snowy exterior, together with touches of pink. The house and surrounds are framed within a discrete border, figures warmly silhouetted in a pinkly lit interior. Humanity becomes the outlier, the anomaly in a changing climate, yet there is a sense too of resilience and hope.
Figures are rare inclusions in his work but in this exhibition there are a few instances of tiny humans silhouetted inside interiors, a reminder perhaps of the confinement to which we were subject for the years of the pandemic.
Davies also revels in subtropical vegetation (spiky palms and pandanus), contrasting pinks and blues and swimming pools that evoke the surreal luxury of modernist ideals. Memory Lens layers these ideas and observations into beautifully executed, highly crafted and imaginative paintings. They have elements both familiar and not, stimulating our own associations with fresh perspectives.
Paul Davies: Memory Lens, until December 9, Jan Murphy Gallery, Fortitude Valley, Tuesday-Saturday, 10am-5pm
janmurphygallery.com.au
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