A palette of faded, sometimes aqueous colors prevails in Noah Davis’s work. The oil paints are often translucent, like watercolors; the muted hues never meet in hard contrasts. The works’ low-key physical presence facilitates intimacy with their subjects: people of color, primarily American, seen mainly in scenes of everyday life but also in oneiric imaginings of what that life might be. A gentle abstraction from reality is felt most forcefully in frankly fictionalized scenarios: A man reads a newspaper by the side of the road; lonely musicians and ballerinas perform amid the low-rise apartment buildings of the Pueblo Del Rio project in South Los Angeles; a mother gives her child a thrashing (as Mary did to the baby Jesus in a well-known painting by Surrealist Max Ernst). On a few occasions, Davis allowed his imagination to run free, as in Painting for My Dad, 2011, in which he painted the figure who presumably represents his father as a hermit in a cave beneath a nocturnal starry sky.
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