Rookie: Paul Davies.

Paul Davies is a Sydney-based artist and COFA graduate working in a number of mediums: painting, photography and sculpture. His most recent work has been of the brush-and-paint variety, and he creates beautiful examples of form and meaning reaching communion.

His latest works explore, among other ideas, the relationship between the part and the whole; the television and the pixel; the painting and the paint; the image and the meaning. It’s a somewhat post-structuralist view, but Davies avoids the clichés of post-whatever art by deliberately avoiding being too obtuse or didactic. His work doesn’t get caught up in stupidly esoteric text or unnecessary enigma as a lot of artists do. You won’t see any words like ‘Pain!’ emblazoned across his pieces. Instead, his works present a number of messages and let you decide what they mean to you. He has a fantastic gift for walking the fine lines – his work doesn’t dictate, but it still has a lot to say.

The latest exhibition of his work at the Twostep Gallery in Newtown is an exploration of the living room (and how we interact with that space) and television (and how we interact with that medium). He has stencilled the walls of Twostep (an old terrace house with a fireplace) to create an exhibition space akin a lounge room. Davies sees a link between television and paintings. ‘TV is a transient thing,’ he says, ‘you pick and choose what you want to watch.’ In the same way, his art allows freedom for the viewer – it forces no ideology but provides the opportunity to explore many.

There is a sense of impermanence to Davies’ work – just as we see in television – which sees pieces with similar colours or images or textures working with each other to present a non-linear artistic narrative. His work uses iconographic images of the past with the aesthetic of the current artistic zeitgeist - bold colours and big contrasts. Expect to see Japanese women or a 50s housewife or a stencil from the early 1900s.

Most impressively, Davies’ work operates beautifully even if the viewer doesn’t want to explore the messages. That is, his pieces are incredible works on a purely aesthetic level. His grasp of painterly techniques is exceptional – his use of colour is especially impressive, with bold pinks and reds teamed with muted blues. He constructs paintings as if they are the part of a whole – this is where the impermanence of his work comes from. It seems as if his paintings could be 10 centimetres or 10 metres and they’d still work.

And, just quietly, he's one of my favourite artists.

(Originally published in The Brag as part of the Rookie column).

(Photo: A Davies piece, my lounge room, yesterday).