Looming Shadows and Obscured Faces

A native of Wales who settled in Paris in 1968 to study drawing and engraving, Richard Davies produced mostly black and white prints, nineteen of which are now on display at Gallery Fukka in Jimbocho. Most were created during the twelve years before his death in 1991, and well before the art world seems to have paid him much notice. There have been several exhibitions of Davies’ engravings in Japan during the last decade, as well as in Paris, most recently at the National Library, but a diagnosis of HIV in 1986 meant the artist would never enjoy the attention his oddly expressive prints have justifiably received. With the exception of one print that has been ungraciously hung above a sink, this is a well-presented show in the clean, bright space of Gallery Fukka, and a welcome chance to discover this little-known artist.

Like the German Expressionists who influenced him, Davies used distortion and enlargement, looming shadows and obscured faces, to great emotional effect. This is most obvious in his depictions of huge, dark smiling men cavorting with tiny, white-clad smiling women. In one, a woman dances the tango with her partner towering above her, while in another a woman sits on a man’s huge knee, his hand under her bottom, a tray holding a teapot and two cups placed nearby. This last detail might be related to the print’s title, Une Romance Anglaise (An English Romance,) but the image is not particularly romantic. However, in spite of the man’s giant-like appearance and outsized smile, it is not exactly foreboding either. Like much of Davies’ work, there is humanity and tenderness in the embraces, but also a palpable loneliness. One wonders if one of the two figures is not merely a figment of the other’s imagination, the tableau a snapshot of a dream.

Davies drew inspiration from the life of busy city streets and circuses, as the German Expressionist did before him. His more intimate works, however, are the most affecting, such as that of a couple sitting across a table from one another, hands close but not touching, a ghostly figure standing in the shadows beside them. In 1980s Je Dance pour Toi mon Amant des Rêves, (I Dance for You, My Dream Lover), a man dances beside a radio, a grave look upon his face, while a girl, her back to the viewer, creates a monstrous shadow on the wall beside him. Again one wonders, who is the dream?

Davies made his engravings in a variety of ways, including mezzotint, a labor-intensive method in which light is scratched from a blackened surface to create the image. This technique, popular in the 18th and 19th centuries and later used in some of M.C. Escher’s work, allows subtle gradations of light and shade to be created without lines. Davies uses this technique to arresting effect in two simple but lovely prints displayed here, one dark and one light. In Sommeil (Sleep) we see a sleeping face emerging from the shadows, as if lit only by a distant streetlight through the window, or perhaps a bit of the glow from a hallway lamp creeping in beneath the door. L’homme au Bandoneon (The Man on the Bandoneon) is a soft and almost cheery image of a smiling man with a bandoneon, the small accordion used to play tango. Music is present throughout these prints, although one begins to imagine it as like the sound of a stylus needle on an old record with the volume turned all the way down, or perhaps that of a distant merry-go-round, turning slowly and carrying only one solitary child. Like many of the people inhabiting Richard Davies’ world, sometimes with arms placed limply on a table or hanging at their sides, and usually staring right back at us, the bandoneon player’s eyes do not smile along with his mouth. Estrangement and loneliness permeate many of these prints, but what makes them so compelling is that it’s not necessarily a sad loneliness, and it is an estrangement that Davies seemed to believe we all share.