GENE DAVIS | UNTITLED

Private Collection, Massachusetts (acquired directly from the artist)

“In Davis’s work, geometry and atmosphere—stripe and color—do more than correlate: they directly coincide, with dialectical impertinence. Davis’s stripe paintings integrate the line and the field: the linear field of stripes is an atmospheric reverie of controlled color. Atmosphere, signaling the uncontrollable—the infinite or sublime—and line, suggestive of control—of having a hold—become one. Davis unites the traditional opposites of art—the sense of lawfulness created by line and the naturalness of color—in a single, determinate structure.”

(Donald Kuspit, “A Perfect Music: Gene Davis’s Stripes, Gene Davis: A Memorial Exhibition, Washington D.C.1987, p. 39)