FLUID LIGHT

Marcus Davies plays with bright, geometric shapes that couldn’t be more different from one another. He experiments with a petri dish, like those from the chemistry lab, reveals the abstract constellation of a soccer game, and creates collages out of leaves that almost appear to be x-rayed. His unique combinations of color fields retain and even emphasize the essence of the topic. This almost humorous way of dealing with color and form always calls on the viewer’s imagination to create connections with the abstract interpretation. With his colorful works he also directly nods to the paintings of his father Thomas Nathaniel Davies, a well-known modern Welsh artist.



With his series Rhus Cotinus Marcus Davies began in 1998 to work with color photography. The artist proceeded as follows: he cut shapes out of acetate, a very transparent and light plastic, and seleced leaves from the smoketree (Rhus Cotinus) – a tree that is characterized by its simple, upside-down-egg-shaped leaf. In the next step, Davies organized his composition, and this physical act was an important one for him: the cut, the collage.


In his next series, which bears the title Petri in homage to scientific experiment, Davies was particularly interested in the movement of light through different liquids: “I used Petri dishes and inkwells in order to capture both the liquid as well as their own formal aesthetic.”


The color photographs of soccer games are titled Filmwork and are taken with substandard film. Thanks to their cell-like, pixilated abstraction, they convey a dynamic and variation of movement in the sport that simply cannot not be expressed by static images.



Contrary to his well-known, contrasty black-and-white photographs, Marcus Davies uses color to explore, above all, the physical act of creation that precedes representation. Thus Davies’s color photos are defined by the strongly varied use of shape, material, and color, which unite in a harmonious, consistent whole.

Horst Kloever