Gene Davis painted the huge Queen’s Gate in 1980, and it’s now up in his solo show at Ameringer McEnery Yohe gallery in New York. More often that not, Davis seems to get dismissed as a provider of intriguing visual fun, pretty much in the mode of op art. After having spent some time with his work recently, I think it’s more profound than that. Rather than catering to visuality, it defeats it: his pictures are hard to look at, hard to absorb, hard to register in full with anything like stable results. That makes them almost as philosophical as they are visual. Lately Bridget Riley has been billed as the philosopher’s op-ster, but I think Davis may deserve the title.
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