Pleasure is an important form of knowledge, and in art, pleasure comes from the bodily confirmation of seeing things in the flesh. That form of knowledge slipped away early this year. In our diminished physical spaces of quarantine, we could no longer take part in that ancient discourse of pleasure, and a pensive somnambulance set in. Then, in late May, the pressure of the pandemic was forcibly mixed with things that have lingered in the American night since our founding — and they exploded. The George Floyd protests initiated the next stage: Everyone went out again, all at the same time. We rediscovered one another. And something else too: the bodily confirmation of the town square, where activism could become a form of creativity. This year reconfigured everything. Experiencing art in galleries and museums, being together, has taken on a new urgency, with added density and intensity. Nothing is neutral here. We’re now hyperaware that art lives in mutinous, contested space.
A thrilling discovery and a terrible loss. In this show organized by curator Helen Molesworth, Davis — who died in 2015 at age 32 — was revealed as a Degas-like painter of hushed intimacy. His images of people in parks, kitchens, and under the stars are clouded in secondary tones and washes that bring his work to ghostly eternal life.