Davis Rhodes describes painting as a dynamic form of agreement, a relation that is always being made and unmade. He variously takes up traditional as well as industrial and graphic display materials, engaging both the grammar and the immediacy of the painted surface, often at the limits of its legibility. What may appear as a threshold of dematerialization – a ‘surface without support’ – opens onto a reciprocal somatic exchange, an immanent mode of encounter and attunement.

Davis Rhodes (b. 1983) lives and works in New York. His solo shows include Team Gallery, New York; Office Baroque, Brussels; Société, Berlin; and Casey Kaplan, New York. Rhodes participated in group shows including Cressman Center for Visual Arts, Louisville; White Flag Projects, St. Louis; Sammlung Haubrok, Berlin; MuZee Oostende, Ostende; and The Kitchen, New York.

Click here to read the full interview, Davis Rhodes in conversation with Andrea Alessi

ARTSLANT INTERVIEW 2012

Andrea Alessi: The term “painting” sometimes appears in quotations when applied to your work. I find myself asking this of artists a lot, but the answer can be quite revealing: Do you describe yourself as a painter? Do you find there are challenges or disclaimers attached to that label?

Davis Rhodes: Absolutely I’m a painter. Painting is a symbolic modality – a particular form of agreement, a relation that is always being made and unmade. It’s not a "subject". There are instances, at given times, of commitment on a material level and to a mode of relation. That’s all. I’m painting with an insistence on immanence and transformation. I’m working with materialist abstraction, its extension in the social field and the way "medium" and mode of address become unstable as a result.

The effect of the pieces, their presence, is always coextensive with this bastard materiality, their fragility, their capacity to be affected. The pieces are appearances, always under threat. The surface has no support. There’s no recourse. It’s only surface. I’m interested in this groundlessness – it’s where I find myself working...The pieces are correlatives to a condition of being. Their 'body' or their 'standing' can't be taken for granted.

Andrea Alessi: Can you talk a bit about your process? Your materials seem to have an agency of their own (the not entirely predictable behaviors of cut vinyl and paint-saturated foamcore, for example). Do they ever rebel?

Davis Rhodes: I’d prefer not to speak to my studio process in detail right now, though I appreciate you saying the materials have an agency of their own. It’s true. They’re not passive. There’s lots of chance in the process.

Andrea Alessi: Installations of your work have gone from recalling the horror vacui of the sign-laden urban landscape, to a systematically staggered layout, to the most recent pared-down set up where each painting gets a lot more breathing room (in your show at Team). How integral are these installation decisions to the meaning of your work and what do they have to say about the autonomy of the artwork?

Davis Rhodes: The recent show at Team in NYC worked through presence, porosity and displacement. The pieces are super sensitive surfaces, registering traces of life elsewhere. That elsewhere haunted the immediacy of the pieces. It also gave them specificity. That’s why the work was installed with lots of space – to put pressure on its being-in-the-world, its capacity for enchantment.

The pieces have no more or less autonomy than we do as subjects. That’s in a way what the [number] 1 is – the conditionality of singularity, but presence nonetheless, and very specific operations in different contexts. The point is just what it does. Nothing inside the pieces is meaningful. It’s about staging an unstable presence – of the works and of the viewer.

Andrea Alessi: So, for you, the encounter is paramount?

Davis Rhodes: Yes, the encounter, and the reality of the work.

INTERVIEW MAGAZINE 2012

Quietly and concisely, Davis Rhodes tweaks perception using his ephemeral hardedge abstractions. With Untitled '12, his second solo show at Team Gallery, which opens tonight, the New York-based Rhodes presents nine new foamcore works. These industrially produced materials lean on the wall, lightweight but heavy with presence. Rhodes describes the feeling in the room as "total freedom from hierarchy, alienation or the pressure of identity."

We see hints of Rhodes's hand in the flat paint color fields. Five of the foams boards are warped by the application of water-based paint. Others seem almost raw. "There's nothing pure here. Just artificial surfaces, illusionism," says Rhodes referring to the show not being a minimalist exercise but rather radical transformation of the materials he is working with. The nine panels stand poetically, vaguely referring to their materiality, resisting Rhodes's influence on their surface. "I work with painting to pressurize everything—whether the pieces even stand at all, as pieces, has everything to do with getting a lot from almost nothing, with no stable support to fall back on."

Rhodes' departure point for the show is a large white "1" painted on to foamcore, which was shown on the street in Brooklyn in 2008 and inspired the body of work which made up his first show at Team, "Untitled '09," a colorful series of marquees, hand gestures and the "1" cut out of painted vinyl. Three years later, Rhodes work is stripped down, completely void of references. Rhodes says, "It's close to the ground, realist, but very open and mutable."