Annette Davidek's paintings are derived from diagrams of
plants, organic life forms as well as old technological illustrations.
These sometimes quirky, repetitive images randomly mutate. Some shapes
flatten, darken and become almost silhouettes. Florescent splays
of color emerge from behind the flattened darker images. At times
the images are almost translucent, similar to a light-soaked field
seen in a microscope. Distinctions blur. Opacity and luminosity,
repulsion and attraction, and tension and dissonance are concerns
of the artist.
Ghosted images vie with more clearly seen parts of her paintings. The
captured, submerged and frozen images create a sense of depth and a
record of her process.
Davidek's paintings of floating forms look “like” so
many things– roots, branches, coral, chromosomes, capillaries,
atoms, algae. Her imagery's ambiguous scale generates a micro
and macroscopic interplay. Despite countless organic references, they
remain abstract shapes repeated throughout the painted space as if
suspended in solution. The artist creates surprising depth with extremely
thin layers of paint, so thin that the wood appears stained. Her compositions
seem as though they have been suddenly flooded with light to reveal
the animated forms within.
Davidek's paintings personify processes of movement and growth
in action as well as shape. Her syrupy lines often bleed, or dissolve,
into the wood, and this fuzziness becomes a pictorial equivalent to
energy. She employs repetition for a fundamental and formal purpose:
mimicking the replication of development and the dynamic of movement.
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AKRON ART MUSEUM: Beauty Reigns: A Baroque Sensibility in Recent Painting, January 24 - May 3, 2015
THE McNAY ART MUSEUM: Beauty Reigns: A Baroque Sensibility in Recent Painting, 2014
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Book, Beauty Reigns, available through the McNay Art Museum & Akron Art Museum bookstores