Ian Davenport

Ian Davenport’s new multi-panelled and large scale paintings, exhibited here for the first time, reveal a further development in his work, both in scale and the complexity of colour. Process is the foundation on which Davenport’s paintings rest, but Davenport is clear to distinguish that this is only a part in his work: ‘Process is a tool; it’s not the point of the paintings. The point is the richness of the final outcome, which is intertwined with a set of procedures’. The new paintings show an increasing range in colour, surface, and proportion. Using pure and subtly modified hues, permutations of colour combinations encompass various intensities, transparencies and inversions. The smooth and sensual surfaces create effects of containment and distance. The viewer’s interaction with the paintings is both dynamic and reflexive. Their arrangement in group’s forms sequences of visual positives and negatives, and temporal and spatial rhythms become evident as one may be literally mirrored in the sometimes reflective surface of the paintings. It is these tensions which keep us examining and looking at the paintings.