Order and Chaos, High Realist Paintings of the Urban Landscape

Richard Davis portraits of the city acknowledge an affinity to the work of his Spanish contemporaries who are themselves inspired by the exquisite compositions of Antonio López-García whose cityscapes are born from an intense scrutiny of the geometries of roads, buildings, balustrades, and the marks that are made upon them.

Order and chaos describes how Davis subtly points to the manner in which the city-based landscape is structured accidentally by urban infrastructure and architecture. His compositions are tightly balanced by the inadvertent harmonies and relationships that occur as if by chance between a window opening, a highways lane marking, a telephone pole, and the sensual arc of an automobiles hood.

Davis manipulates – even radically alters – these found relationships in complex visual harmonies that tell much about the manner in which the seeming randomness of the city is actually organized into complicated lyrical patterns that tame urban alienation. His geometries have a musicality that humanizes their depersonalized natures.