Noah Davis review – LA painter of everyday black life is a revelation | Art

Noah Davis (1983-2015) was a great painter, a pioneer of free culture in black working-class Los Angeles and a terrible loss to contemporary art. He died of cancer at the age of 32, leaving a young family, a wildly unconventional gallery and several hundred strange and immemorial paintings.

In LA he is especially remembered for the Underground Museum, established in a row of shops so remote from the city’s hub that wealthy collectors had trouble finding it. It is humorously evoked, at the Barbican, with the “Jeff Koons” vacuum cleaner Davis bought for $70 on Craigslist, the knock-off Duchamp ready-mades, and the William Kentridge film he blagged off a curator at LA’s Museum of Contemporary Art (Moca) – which is where his own paintings would have their first museum display.

Some of Davis’s works became classics overnight. And so it seems in this beautiful retrospective, where each painting seems entirely new and yet somehow already passing into memory. That is in their nature, of course, for so much of what he painted was drawn out of the recent past, even though it seems to be happening right now.

A solitary man carrying an old leather briefcase walks across the canvas right to left, we do not quite know where. A remote backdrop carries hints of Edinburgh Castle, somehow, as well as the California landscape. Monolithic architectural forms dwarf his distinct profile – Davis is a wonderful shape-maker – around which light plays like St Elmo’s fire. The man is unique, and he is alone, as we all are when facing life’s journey.

Another man sits deep in a bower of jungly foliage. He has a rifle. It ought to be ominous but there are overtones of Manet. And just as you might be thinking of Matisse and Rothko, in the early galleries, comes a swimming pool from the days of segregation (it takes a moment to notice that everyone is black, from the girl with water up her nose to the boy basking below the surface). The pool is full of human beings, drifting, playing, vulnerably bare, who have no civil rights. The scene is disturbing, yet the water is all diaphanous blue and turquoise, somewhere between Richard Diebenkorn and Monet.

Davis grew up in Seattle, the son of a lawyer and brother of film-maker Kahlil Joseph, collaborator with Kendrick Lamar. He was educated in New York but left for Los Angeles, where a job at the Moca bookstore allowed for the long study of catalogues. Davis’s work is steeped in art history. His oil paint stains or veils the canvas, hovers in soft blurs, occasionally descends in washy drips like fine rain. The face of The Architect – based on the black architect Paul Revere Williams, who perfected the art of drawing upside down, since his white clients didn’t like to sit next to him – is almost entirely concealed behind a mist of white paint. Made when Davis was only 25, it is avowedly political. But as TJ Clark writes in the excellent catalogue, the portrait is both reckless and gentle.

Honesty and heartfelt sincerity are not uppermost traits of most 21st-century painting but they characterise all of Davis’s work. He loves what he is looking at, which may equally be a flea-market trove of photographs of families messing about in LA in the 1970s, the city lights by night beneath the rival glow of the moon, or his own family at different ages.

Sisters doze on a white sofa, sunlight casually burnishing their long dark legs. His wife, Karon, appears holding two vast yellow fans at her sides, like golden wings, against the peeling white walls of the stucco house where they lived: a latterday Isis in LA. A haunting painting of Karon as a child shows her black face concealed behind the white mask of the Holly Hobbie doll, a popular toy in 70s America. She looks ancient, even pharaonic, the white stripes of her pyjamas like the bandages of an Egyptian mummy.

The Missing Link 4 shows black bathers in a swimming pool overshadowed by a monstrous office block of small rectangles, which may refer to reality but also to the grids of Mark Bradford, another African American painter based in Los Angeles. (It is as if they all live together, bathers and painters alike, in this separate world.) Davis was well loved in the West Coast art scene, included as early as 2008 alongside influential black artists from David Hammons to Glenn Ligon and Kara Walker in a momentous art show. He was the youngest painter.

But for all the sophistication of his work, there is always this profound and candid emotion. His father appears by night before a vast starry sky, standing with a lantern on the edge of a rocky precipice. Davis paints him from behind, looking out at this voluminous darkness, into which he will one day disappear. The artist, with absolute empathy, sees and paints it too, even though he cannot (yet) follow.

Almost all of the works in this spacious and loving retrospective, with its eloquent wall texts and climactic film of Davis laughing, painting and shyly talking, were made in seven years. Some are necessarily callow. 40 Acres and a Unicorn, from 2007, takes General Sherman’s famously unrealised promise of land for freed enslaved people and turns it into a satirical dreamscape, in which a boy rides a mythical mule with a horn in its forehead.

But in later years, the world quietens, the art deepens and the paintings approach archetype. Perhaps the most lyrical of all Davis’s paintings come from the Pueblo del Rio series, set in Williams’s LA housing project for black defence workers in 1941. With low-rise buildings and shared green lawns, it should have been a garden city; but it quickly degenerated. Davis paints it back into beauty.

Six black ballet dancers in white gloves and tutus perform arabesques between the houses. Vernon reads his glowing white newspaper against the basketball railings at twilight. And a boy in uniform plays the Last Post beneath a mauve dusk and all the shadows are pearly grey, except his own, which runs at a special angle as if music singled him out. Here they all are in this earthly paradise, but already departing: glimmers held here by the paint through time.