King Kong 1969

Gene Davis made this painting, ‘King Kong,’ with acrylic on canvas. Look at how the color is organized, those vertical stripes are so systematic, a bit like Sol Lewitt’s structures, but with this warm palette it feels more musical than mathematical. The painting is all about surface: it is flat and matte, you can see the trace of the brush in the direction of the lines. I like the way the stripes have slightly blurred edges where the colors meet; there is no crispness, it's soft, and that quality gives a human, hand-made feeling to the piece, the imperfection is the personality. Take the central pink stripe, for example. It's a candy pink and the way it sits between the browner tones is so arresting, it's like a flash of something synthetic in amongst the earth tones. Davis’s systematic stripe paintings remind me a little of Agnes Martin’s grids, except they are looser, more colourful. It is like he's setting himself a problem, a set of rules, and then letting the colour run wild within them. The rules don't mean a thing except as a structure to push against.