Michael Davidson

Michael Davidson is a painter living and working in Toronto. He graduated from the semi-infamous University of Guelph's Visual Arts program with a BFA in 1988 under the tutelage of Tony Scherman, Suzy Lake and others who made the school what it is. His Curriculum Vitae is linked here. In the last twenty years of exhibiting, his painting work has become more increasingly concerned with the trajectory of late modernism and painting as a pure medium in the sense that we discuss such things in the work of Robert Ryman or, say, Barnett Newman. They are paintings outside of the context of fashions in the world of contemporary art, which is to say - they exist only in the framework of their own internal logic. They are concerned with gesture and total economy of figuraion. In this sense they should not be considered 'abstract' in any way.  They are indeed figurative and representational – though not necessarily related to that 'representational world' that we normally think of when we hear the word.

Time Recorded I	Time Recorded II
Time Recorded III	Wave and Plane

Davidson's earlier 'mixed-media' work, partially photographic at times, serves as an interesting barometer of his departure from more traditionally representational forms of figuration into the more self-reflexive syntax of later work – as though the formal language that would become his faithful medium were 'virally' replacing the forms of traditional photographic space. Michael Davidson - 'In Halos'

Michael Davidson - Grand Army of the #48409D

Michael Davidson -'Sunset Boulevard'