Phil Davis
Phil Davis’ latest suite of paintings bleat. Enter the chief work, the largest hanging at 48x60,” The Beach Boys. It was a photoshoot one day at the San Diego Zoo where the titular Beach Boys struck their pose within a paddock of bleating goats that would become the image of an album burned into the retinae and ears of the youth, long past its 1966 release. While the bizarre image of the five men and chomping mammals cue a visual origin of Pet Sounds’ genesis, accelerated over fifty years later, Davis’ paramount painting poses a different address. As our sight zings to a painted surface, an object made entirely by the mortal, fallible hand, “pet” in the name of the source album and activity figured, aided by the alliteration to the classification of things on the wall, “paintings,” our minds speedily free associate two tactile actions. Quickly, it multiplies as the viewer reinscribes herself in the experience, embodying a triangulation of veridical forces: petting, painting, present tense.
Bleating is a plea, an exclaim, and if the onomatopoeia should take any preposition, it is at not for. Three ps are now, in the plain sightedness of The Beach Boys. Struck in sound of alliteration of pet and paint, Davis’ paintings proffer placidity, proposing a continued variation of the 1966 album name: what is pet, or felt, is not that which is tangible. “Sounds” is therefore personified and what we feel is their near inaudibility. The verb to pet, a soft stroke, tempers. In short order, the stroke is heard.
Citing the aural and tactile in arrival and appearance, Davis’ paintings emerge within their attended surfaces in quick, choppy facture. It is this tempo that feigns flotation, as though each canvas caught its image in a moment of luck, but the economical pacing of brush, its consistent
width, and the withholding palette of, for example, the B.W. grouping, shrewdly indulge self- historicization. Never mind the fact of source image of the pale visages weighted with the quintessential mop-top, these particular portrait-sized pieces recall retrieval, retracing, resuscitation. Their marble palette tells us so, their pupil-less eyes place us in want, feeling our eyes flicker, conjuring a personality so as to affirm ours. Our lust for signification dually courted and denied, returns site to the present tense. Where, what, who, when become thwarted by why; the last w hinging on the domain of sight. After all, B.W.’s title indicates not just the front man’s initials, but a greyscale tonal value.
Yet in the eponymous painting, this tonal value is punctured. Sight veers right, drifts up: it is in this drafty corner of the clouded, clipped, pattered touch of Prussian blue we respire. But for a rest, as our heads pitch center once again, we seek to delineate shape and form by perceptual touch, mirroring what occurs in the temperature change at that punctuation of blue. A boundary disambiguates to compound the acts of rendition, reverie, reception, rousing the splendor of the surfaces’ sensorial encounter. In equal measure, Davis, The Beach Boys, and their audience pet this herd of paintings.
—Mona Welch, 2024