I keep returning to one of Noah Davis’ works painted just before his death. Untitled (2015) centres two women in a moment of slumber. Sleeping back to back on a cream upholstered sofa, this pair are blissfully unaware of my presence or that of another figure seated to the right of the canvas. Technically I am an interloper, my gaze looking where it cannot be returned, the door to the room of these somnolent subjects wide open – though not necessarily as an invitation for my intrusion into or inclusion in this portrait of quiet intimacy. Unable to open the door further nor make my way into the space of the room, I contemplate, on its threshold, the ease of the women, the light in which their slumbering forms are framed, the smoothness of resting limbs and slackened skin, the sense of being eluding the coordinates of time and place, the floor dissolving beneath their feet, two leather shoes discarded, floating in the hushed tones of it all. Taking this in, I realise I cannot enter because, maybe, like Davis, I am leaving the scene, taking one last look, savouring the warmth of bodies, the notion of family, the touch of togetherness; its loose and languid language of belonging. Like Davis, who was a few weeks or months away from his death at the time of creating the painting, I am taking a moment to enjoy what I will one day no longer have.

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It is telling that the inspiration for paintings like Untitled originates from Davis’ personal archive of photographs. Basing painted representation in the photographic can impose certain boundaries on the imagination, on compositional possibilities and on the sensibility of a work. But in Davis’ hands the supposed fixity and certainty of the photograph – its socio-political or cultural limits, textures, sounds and seeming – become lax. Time stops or loosens, the depth of a flat image expands, and surfaces lose their slick or staged glean. Looking at the paintings in the Barbican’s retrospective, this personal archive is everywhere implied yet also everywhere augmented. Like Untitled, the figurative paintings partly derived from actual photographs become somewhat abstracted; that is, their dimensions slide, their social signifiers slip and their material markers slope towards the poetic and the mythical. Shoes float, faces blur and the cropped afro of a young man glows. Taking his cue from photographs of Black individuals communing or going about their day, Davis imbues the quotidian with wonder; he draws out the extraordinary from the ordinary and he deepens trivial views with an incandescent intensity all of their own. The Black quotidian is not so much beautified in his work, therefore, but revealed as more, as beautiful, as boundless, from the start.

The beauty of works like Untitled starts with Davis’ photographic archive. Made up of images bought at LA swap meets (the US equivalent of a British flea market), his personal ‘album’ teems with the sights and sounds of late twentieth-century living. Drawn to vintage photographs and polaroid shots of suburbia or the metropolis, Davis’ collection, though dwelling in the simplicity of the everyday, brims with the beauty and brightness of the Black communal. Women and men pose consciously in back gardens or in front of landmarks like the Eiffel tower. In one photograph, a chicly dressed woman holds a tightly swaddled baby, her face averted from the lens. In another, a young man assertively turns to the camera, the neatness of his side-parting complimented by the elegance of his turtleneck top. Across the archive, the poetry of these moments exists precisely because they have been somewhat dislocated from the politics of time and the specifics of space. No longer assembled into a history, or indeed, a historiography of Black life – though they do, indeed, form a dream-like set of mnemonics – these photographs tap the personal not necessarily to unveil universal truths, but to dwell in the beauty of the detail, however fleeting it may be.

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In Davis’ hands, however, these photographic details are significantly magnified, and the dislocation from sociological artefact to artistic representation is achieved with wondrous results. Reanimating the archive and prising subjects free from the violence that can occur when collated or exhibited in a sociologically or museological fashion, Davis’ transforms the photographic into the painted, the static and exact into a moving, hovering vision. Works like Untitled, then, are more than just a pair of women sleeping side-by-side on a sofa, but become a portrait of telling intimacy and intimate knowledge dislodged from the cold facts of how, when, why and whom this concerns. This divestment of hard photographic depiction does, however, lend Davis’ work a sense of dissolution and disorientation, whereby a single moment collapses into multiple, and the subject is unleashed from the gravity of the here and now. Helen Molesworth has noted how Davis’ figures appear ‘untethered’, shadowless and unmoored, floating in a ‘nimbus’ of light. No longer photographic representations that bear the social weight of life, Davis’ painted subjects are free to fly or to linger in the leisure of the moment.

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Some paintings take this sense of flight and weightlessness to another level. The Missing Link 1 (2013), for instance, shows a young boy flying above his grounded peers, transcending the limits of physics and, perhaps, those socially enforced upon a Black male child. That this particular painting includes a photograph printed onto and worked upon a canvas reinforces this process of dislocation and disruption when it comes to engaging with the photographic. The child soars above a medley of frenetic and energetic bodies, but it is his aggrandisement, his supernatural feat of suspension above empirical rules and landed logic that holds our attention. The photographic here distorts and disconnects from the actual, and defers to the probability of the improbable. Likewise, in The Conductor (2014), we see a Black man in coat and tails standing on a chair that appears to be levitating. Holding his baton high, counting time to no one and nothing, the titular conductor cuts a solitary figure, sans orchestra and audience. Displaced against a blank building, incongruous to his surroundings, the conductor creates his own music overheard in the melancholic blues, greys and browns of Davis’ palette. The photographic is again completely transposed and, in its hazy and free-falling formal state finds ground in the shadow of the man, in the ghostly vision (is it another painting or fugue-like musical state?) that emits from his wand-cum-paintbrush of a baton. Freed of the baggage of their socio-political surrounds, these individuals literally leave the ground and soar. In Davis’ painted realisations, the poetic potential embedded in the photographic abounds.

Sometimes Davis interjects and infuses the photographic not with what was, but with what could and should be. In his Pueblo Del Rio series, he reimagines an impoverished and disenfranchised district in LA as a communal utopia, one where fantasy could be realised. Thus we see a sextet of Black ballerinas dance in arabesque upon a community lawn, their perfect placement of arms and legs in harmonious symmetry with the surrounding white houses and green yards (Pueblo Del Rio, Arabesque, 2014). And we see a young musician in full band regalia playing a horn alone near a sidewalk, his shadow mirroring those of the trees, solidifying the magical into the realism of shade and light (Pueblo Del Rio, Prelude, 2014). Here the transmutation of photographic representation gives way to the full imaginative possibilities of paint, to the proleptic imageries of the canvas, to the potential of Davis’ aspirational creativity, envisaging cultural highs for a community subject all too often to the severe material lows of life.

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But the works that really release the photographic from its socio-political and anthropological chains is the ironically named series 1975 (2013). Turning to his family’s personal archive, specifically photographs taken by his mother, Faith Childs-Davis, as a young high school senior in Chicago, Davis moves into the female gaze and framing of the world as it was in the 70s. And yet, his paintings offer no replication of the fashions or forms, mores or manners of this period. Instead, Davis’ way of seeing meets his mother’s in the broadening of the photographic and the blossoming of filmic vision into paint. Turning the temporal into the permanent, 1975 holds our gaze specifically because it is removed from the trappings of its eponymous era and is estranged from the signs of its original time. Whether tenderly depicting the back of a stranger’s head or an overcrowded lido in the heat of summer, 1975 loosens its former archival tendencies to categorise, enclose, fix and date, and instead gestures to what the art of photography, much like painting, sometimes can be, as Mark Sealy has observed, ‘omnipresent, sensorial, multidirectional’, permeating and resonate, ‘disruptive’ and subsequently ‘jazz-like’ in this disruption. Moving through these open-ended visions, where boys are suspended in a cerulean vista mid-dive or bodies swim undisturbed by breeze or current, Davis slows us down, attunes us to a different frequency, a new wave length and lighter way of being, and encourages us to pause on the threshold of his transportive and transformative works, so that the image lives, not in the annals of time, but the vibrant life of our minds.

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Cover: Noah Davis at work, Los Angeles, 2009, Photo by Patrick O'Brien-Smith.

Born in Seattle, Davis studied painting at the Cooper Union School of Art in New York before moving to Los Angeles, where, in 2012, he founded The Underground Museum in the city’s Arlington Heights neighborhood with his wife and fellow artist, Karon Davis. Davis’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Roberts & Tilton, Culver City, California (2008, 2010, and 2013); Tilton Gallery, New York (2009 and 2011); PAPILLION, Los Angeles (2014); and the Rebuild Foundation, Chicago (2016), among others. Noah Davis: Imitation of Wealth opened at The Underground Museum on the day of the artist’s untimely death at age thirty-two, due to complications from a rare cancer. An acclaimed solo presentation of Davis’ work was shown at David Zwirner, New York and later travelled to The Underground Museum, Los Angeles, in 2022. A retrospective of Davis’s work was held at DAS MINSK Kunsthaus, Potsdam, Germany, in 2024. The exhibition is currently on view at the Barbican Art Gallery, London, and will travel to the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, later this year.

Hannah Hutchings-Georgiou is a writer, researcher and arts event moderator based in London.

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