Michael David at Knoedler - painting - New York, New York - Review Of Exhibitions

Art in America, Jan, 1994 by Joseph Ruzicka

For more than a decade, David's overriding concern has been to infuse richly painted abstract compositions with multiple layers of meaning by embedding in them simple, suggestive shapes and symbols. Early on, the worked up extremely dense paint-and-wax surfaces on thick, shaped canvases. Later he developed similar surfaces on multipart, multilevel rectangular canvases. More recently he began to open up windows in the compositions and paint clearly recognizable objects.

In his new "Wolfen Series," David has synthesized all of these developments in subtle, elegant paintings that show a harmonious relationship between image, ground, execution and meaning, where no one part dominates the others. Generally, each painting consists of a single rectangle of wood bordered on all sides by meticulously joined boards that serve as both frame and extension of the composition. The anonymous construction of the support is firmly denied by a deep, dense tapestry of paint and wax.

At the heart of each painting is an area reserved for a simple image, such as a target or a Star of David, inscribed in a near-monochrome field of wax. It is the image that suggests more verbal, literal meanings. In The Silver Cane (for R.M.), a black bull's-eye shot through with white and red can be read as a chart of the solar system, with the planetary orbits outlined in the deep blackness of space. Yet when rendered in white, in A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence, this image assumes a clear kinship to Jasper Johns's white target paintings, a reference vastly different in character and feel. Although David exercises much economy in his range of motifs, he exploits the multiple meanings each carries through the ways he presents them.

The paint surface of the nonfigurative parts of these pieces deepens the poetry of the work. David effects a wordless beauty that meshes perfectly with the more specific allusions of the motifs. For example, surrounding the central image in The Silver Cane is a broad expanse of layer upon layer of vigorously brushed paint, scraped and rubbed away in places to reveal underlying strata. The depth of these passages of pure painting encourages sustained scrutiny on the part of the viewer. The visual richness of these passages can impart such a feeling of age and history that you imagine that you glimpse bits of the past as you scan the surface. This almost archeological sense is often enhanced by David's choice of ancient imagery, such as the Star of David in The Shock Headed Peter or the fragments of medieval-style lettering in Letter to my Father (II).