Some of Davidson's panels could have been excised
from a Piero della Francesca painting; others, on close
inspection, are patterned - a series of tiny blue circles,
or the kinds of airy nautilus whorls you find in "eclectic" textile
designs from the 1990s.
There's
one panel that shows the sky as a cluster of white
contour-map-like curves
imposed on an undifferentiated blue background, and
this is an attractive theory, that the sky only looks
flat but is in fact full of various volumes. The
effect of stepping back from close inspection tells you
that
the sky in reality - never mind painting - is inherently
Impressionist, a mass of vapors willfully organized
into a snapshot.
There's intellectual
and sensual pleasure in Davidson's sky, but Ken Fandell's
work is like a delirious sock to the sternum. His large-scale
photographs have an intense painterly quality, largely
because more than anything they recall the kinds of
ornate, cloud-filled sky paintings that fill the domes
of Baroque cathedrals, the kind of sky that announces
the presence of God but also allows the painter to
show off a little.
What Fandell has
done is to photograph the sky multiple times from a single
point over the
course of a few days, and then montage them together.
The result is a massive, impossible sky that gives
you no sense of direction or gravity, with light
coming from everywhere and an airy feeling of weightlessness.
|