Santa Monica

Painter James Davis is a storyteller from society’s dark side. He is skilled at weaving ambiguous pictorial narratives infected by an almost palpable sense of violence.

Similar in emotional keening to the electric images of Francis Bacon, Davis uses rich paint to charge his scenarios with the vagueness and symbolic weirdness of a nightmare. Davis’ world is more densely populated than Bacon’s and his terror is less of isolation than of the impact of society’s brutal indifference.

It would be a mistake to think that Davis is painting sociopaths wreaking random violence upon civilization. His figures standing in stuffy men’s clubs, making love or being buried alive by a mine cave-in seem frighteningly average. Still they perpetuate terrible crimes like gang rape, or recoil in terror at every sound while their minds run on, detached from reality. In some of the most challenging images figures are part of an overall insensitivity to slaughter characterized by fragmented images of road kills, dying atolls and houses haunted by old suicides and murders. Powerfully complex stuff, and uncomfortably on target for an age of slippery ethics. (Andrea Ross Gallery, 2110 Broadway, to Jan 6.)