Ian Davenport: Mirrors and Lights

Bright, powerful lines of paint flow down an aluminium sheet in long vertical trails, creating a clean, dynamic pattern. The bottom edge of the aluminium “canvas” is slightly curved, allowing the colours to spread out here, intermingling and forming psychedelic puddles – and hence the images get their name: Puddle Paintings.

With his poured-line pictures, Ian Davenport has made a name for himself in the art world, developing a visual language all his own – one that is both unmistakable and yet also infinitely malleable. His Puddle Paintings are like a festival of colours, a clear yet cleverly composed ode to the joy of seeing and of art itself. But the works are much more than that. They are created through a process that recalls the meticulous work of a surgeon or scientist working with precision. In the case of Ian Davenport, it is a paint-filled syringe that he uses to apply his colours to the top edge of his aluminium sheet, from where they run straight down the length of the metallic backdrop, leaving vivid trails behind them.

It’s not only the syringe that links Ian Davenport to the scientific approach, but also his sense of curiosity. There is clearly an inquisitive spirit behind the stripes in his images. In one part of his previous œuvre, for example, the colour palette of his Puddle Paintings could be traced back to well-known works in art history, such as Édouard Manet’s Olympia (1863). The series of Puddle Paintings that arose from Davenport’s study of this particular modernist work will also be on display in the exhibition. His technique is grounded in an analysis of the specific colours they contain. Davenport isolates these colours and allowed them to flow down the metal sheet as stripes – and voilà, a completely new work of art was created.