The figures in Noah Davis’s paintings, portrayed within modernist architecture, in domestic interiors, or in public places of leisure, are invariably black. They are ordinary men, women, and children intimately captured mid-repose, at play, or going about their daily lives. In some works, they’re projected into extraordinary scenarios that are futuristic, cinematic, unsettling and enigmatic. Davis’s representation of black life is at the core of his painterly interrogation of the fiction of difference. Or, in the artist’s own words, “Race plays a role in as far as my figures are black. The paintings aren’t political at all though. If I’m making any statement, it’s to just show black people in normal scenarios, where drugs and guns are nothing to do with it.”