SANGUINE

VAUGHN DAVIS JR.

OPENING RECEPTION:
SATURDAY, JULY 29TH
1:00 - 4:00PM

EXHIBITION DATES:
JULY 29 - SEPTEMBER 2, 2023

Romer Young Gallery is excited to present its second solo exhibition with St. Louis artist Vaughn Davis Jr. There will be an opening reception on Saturday, July 29th, 1-4pm.

Sanguine presents a collection of three vibrant, large scale, color-soaked abstractions characterized by transformation. Thinking about color as action, noun and adjective, Davis considers painting in an expanded form, creating work that occupies a teasingly ambiguous realm where painting leaves off, sculpture begins, and performance interlineates. Cut, torn, frayed, ripped, shredded, and sliced, his surface treatments of flat, unprimed, pigmented canvases expand upon the tenets of Abstract Expressionism.

Davis chooses to express feeling rather than figurative form, thus moving beyond ideas of artistic representation, conceiving the work of art instead as a trace of communication between him and the world. Invisible truths are made visible. His abstractions embrace simplicity while simultaneously folding in complex, layered meaning. “I would like these works to be beacons of beauty and struggle, products of labor, and objects of time.” Shaped from the individual experience of everyday life, and saturated with vivid layers of paint, the saturated canvases reflect inspirations and experimentations, integrate personal stories and family histories, thus tracing a life. The tearing and distressing of his paintings are both process and social protest. The distress of the materials and deconstructed painting reference daily struggles, while the final work exists as a torn metaphor, questioning its own existence. Ultimately, each canvas is a documentation of its making and an embodiment of the time, space and emotion created by the very body and movement of the artist himself.

With a nod to predecessors and influences - Frank Bowling, Howardena Pindell, Sam Gilliam, Jackson Pollock, to name a few - Davis inserts himself into the history of the humble cotton cloth. Canvases hang and spill off the wall, creating organic, formless, unfurled, open-ended, shape-shifting objects. Davis soaks and stains the unprimed canvas with pools of acrylic pigment allowing the paint to merge with the weave of the canvas. He paints using automotive cleaning sponges, a mop, and a parking lot paint striper. His choice to paint on the ground is a seminal strategy, a threefold nod drawing a line between the history of art, labor, and craft. “By undoing the threads of painted canvas, I think of borrowing tools of labor and undoing a labored object. I connect with these tools, in a way, paying homage to the working class people. In another way, the form of these tools fit the function of my labored painting experience.” Beautiful and raw, these abstractions make subtle statements that add depth to art’s role in a society undergoing dramatic change.

Vaughn Davis Jr. received his BFA with Departmental Honors in Sculpture from Webster University in St. Louis. His work has been exhibited at, Philip Slein Gallery, St. Louis; Malin Gallery, New York; The Luminary St. Louis; Romer Young Gallery, San Francisco; Gazebo Gallery, Kent, OH; among others. In 2022 he was invited to participate in the Curated Storefront, Akron as part of the Front International: Cleveland Triennial For Contemporary Art and was chosen as a representative of his home state, Missouri, in the Delta Voices: Artists of the Mid South Triennial. Davis was chosen as Laumeier’s 2023 Kranzberg Exhibition artist and he is one of ten semi-finalists for the 2024 Great Rivers Biennial at the CAM, St Louis.

For more information, please contact the gallery at info@romeryounggallery.comor 415.550.7483.