Private View: Wednesday 12th October 6pm - 8.30pm

Jonathan Davis is a visual abstract artist working in mixed media, creating both two and three dimensional work.  Jonathan is concerned with the processes of making and producing abstract surfaces, investigating the visual and aesthetic potential of everyday materials.  This show focuses on his two dimensional pieces.

Formerly an architect and urban designer, Jonathan’s work captures elements of design from his former career, producing works in both colour and monochrome that have a distinctly urban, almost industrial aesthetic.

Jonathan uses pure transition elements as pigments which he often combines with acrylic paint, applied to canvas and panels. His innovative processes set up conditions for generating phenomena through the interaction of transition elements with reagents.  His painting techniques exploit these pigments’ propensity for change thus bringing about new states which result in a variety of partially predictable colour, mark and texture.

Panta Rhei is from Heraclitus (ca. 500 BCE) meaning “everything flows”.  Heraclitus was a pre-Socratic philosopher who stated that fire was the origin of all things and that permanence is an illusion as all things are in perpetual flux.

In Jonathan’s Panta Rhei pieces we see the results of carefully controlled procedures.  The colour and textural qualities of hand prepared metallic paints are transformed on the surface of the paintings with chemical reagents.  Whilst some of the work comprises single surfaces, often in large format, other pieces are produced in modular panels that are magnetically float mounted on steel sheets enabling choice and comparison.  Some of the pieces in this series are seen as having geo or topographical relationships with the real world while others are perhaps characters in the manner of “personages”.

These phenomena paintings are the result of unique and innovative processes.  They are texturally rich, aesthetically complex and we are delighted to be exhibiting them at Highgate Contemporary Art.