JEREMY OKAI DAVIS
Jeremy Okai Davis is a painter from Portland Ore., who makes portraits with a clear eye, in a style that allows for supreme likeness and abstraction to coexist. Because of this, his paintings richly entertaining upon multiple visits. They’re infectious, and to me, his humor is inseparable from the relaxed and humane disposition you see in his portraits. You’ll find this in the portraits he’s done of party-going close friends, or strangers he’s discovered in old photographs whose lives he imagines through new renderings.
Davis has a brand new show showing of his art, on view at the Lonnie B. Harris Black Cultural Center at Oregon State University, which is a permanent installation of his work there. This exhibition is in keeping with what is also permanently on view at Harlem Studio Museum’s Speaking of People: Ebony, Jet and Contemporary Art, which is to say it’s art that specifically references African American culture, the artist’s heritage.
For a recent studio visit piece at artcritical, I climbed the stairs to Jeremy’s loft to see for the first time a massive painting that he’d been working on for a half of a year. This painting is flooring, absolutely dumbfounding. Titled “Predicting a Movement,” it’s flanked by twenty-five small portraits. Both the large painting and the small ones bear a figural likeness that’s both exacting and evidence of artistic reimagining. One memorable thing about these paintings is that they honor black culture in a time and place where there’s still such a racial divide — and this is done in a skillful way that is reverent (also classic), experimental, and partly abstract — leaving room for the viewer’s imagination to create new meanings and associations with the already information-and-emotion rich imagery.
The small portraits are of black leaders in their younger ages, from Martin Luther King to. Condoleezza Rice, and with keen likenesses to their subjects (made from photographs), save for abstract flourishes take nothing away from their natural resemblances. Both the small portraits and the large feature piece are painted in mainly blacks, whites, and browns, but in the large painting there’s a background of bright orange that allows everything on top of it to jump out three-dimensionally.
To add to this dimensional aspect, Davis’ hand is totally visible everywhere on the painting’s surface. They are so built up with visible brush strokes it would be difficult to see them as simply being flat cartoonish daubings. Instead, they’re full of the kind of depth that leaves you standing in front of them, in surprise, for much longer than you’d planned on. All this of course has to do with Jeremy’s new paintings’ visceral and impactful effects, by which I hope leaves all who visits the Cultural Center with even more a sense of power and gratitude courtesy of the artist’s creative depictions. This work, like the best of any work of art, is both timeless and right-now.
