Cover image of the review
Juan Davila, Ohhhhhh!, 2014, oil on canvas, 200 × 250 cm. © Juan Davila, Courtesy Kalli Rolfe Contemporary Art Photo credit: Mark Ashkanasy

Spring1883


8 Aug 2021
Kalli Rolfe Contemporary Art

If local art was more loyal, or if we cared more about elders here, you could easily see how the great Juan Davila might be esteemed as a father figure by young artists in Melbourne today. His joy, his intelligence, his pervy fecundity and his peculiar brand of beauty has children at many Spring1883 booths. The patriarch of Neon Parc, you might say; if the artists in FUTURES or Discordia need a daddy, they could do worse than this powerfully strange painter in the online booth of Kalli Rolfe Contemporary Art.

Juan Davila, Ohhhhhh!, 2014, oil on canvas, 200 × 250 cm. © Juan Davila, Courtesy Kalli Rolfe Contemporary Art Photo credit: Mark Ashkanasy

With the most expensive work at the fair—the online host, Artsy has a “Sort by: Price (desc.)” feature—Davila’s enormous canvas Ohhhhhh! (2014) is just big enough to spark joy through my computer screen. I react strongly against his kitsch handling of warm and cool toned paint, but I know that’s the point. Justin Clemens once pointed out that Davila’s colours “are at once quite horrible and quite attractive simultaneously”. Still Life with Bleeding Heart (1992) is even more delightful and contains the fragmented politics of Davila’s classic appropriation era. Yet just as I’m appreciating Davilas-past, the artist’s newest pieces appear to rip some pleasure from the heart of his work. A series of seven works on paper, all attractive in hue, have their centre torn out. Has Davila removed a figure from these landscapes? I am not quite sure, but the holes speak to an undeniable frustration of 2021, along with a kind of wordlessness that feels new for this painter of typically chatty canvases.

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