The End is the Beginning
JMikal Davis is a Brooklyn-based artist known for his unique style of abstract murals and paintings that integrate ornate patterning, discordant colors, and sharp, fragmented geometry. His studio practice evolved out of a formal arts education and an early love of nontraditional art while growing up in the Southern United States. His aesthetic language fuses the contemporary and the traditional, reflecting the minimalist deconstruction of Graffuturism, the handmade folk art style of the Mission School, and the governing principals of the Pattern and Design movement.
In his latest body of work, he has embraced these principals and turned them on their head, opting for a reinterpretation of the latter. Davis is deconstructing and reconstructing/recycling elements from his oeuvre. Patterns that were once repeating are isolated and broken free to exist as a single entity and then enlarged. Colors and patterns now fade and dissolve into the canvas juxtaposed with hard edge swaths of color and pattern that defined the previous work. These paintings, in fact, are painted versions of collages made from the blue tape used for masking in the earlier work. Davis wanted to capture the freedom of marks that were telegraphed on the ‘unused’ aspects of the paintings. Collecting the strips of blue painter’s tape reorganizing them into a new composition then using that composition as a launching point for these paintings. There is a tension that comes along with this process that are evident in the work, shapes almost touching, colors fading into other colors, patterns disappearing, and taking something that has been used and transforming into something else, in that by challenging the decorative taboo he has embraced the pattern the quintessential decorative element.
In his latest body of work, he has embraced these principals and turned them on their head, opting for a reinterpretation of the latter. Davis is deconstructing and reconstructing/recycling elements from his oeuvre. Patterns that were once repeating are isolated and broken free to exist as a single entity and then enlarged. Colors and patterns now fade and dissolve into the canvas juxtaposed with hard edge swaths of color and pattern that defined the previous work. These paintings, in fact, are painted versions of collages made from the blue tape used for masking in the earlier work. Davis wanted to capture the freedom of marks that were telegraphed on the ‘unused’ aspects of the paintings. Collecting the strips of blue painter’s tape reorganizing them into a new composition then using that composition as a launching point for these paintings. There is a tension that comes along with this process that are evident in the work, shapes almost touching, colors fading into other colors, patterns disappearing, and taking something that has been used and transforming into something else, in that by challenging the decorative taboo he has embraced the pattern the quintessential decorative element.
