Susan Keating looks at Colin Davidson’s monumental life-size ‘paintings in the round’
What was Colin Davidson thinking? Northern Ireland’s most prominent portrait painter has set aside his easel-based art in favour of three-dimensional plastic works. This move raises the question of whether painting should stay in its own lane. Davidson’s recent installation at the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA), ‘Stranger’, featured six monumental life-size figures cut off below the knee, loosely arranged in a circle. Unlike, for example, Rodin’s expressive six-figure Burghers of Calais (1884-95), the figures in Davidson’s grouping are independent of each other, with no discernible narrative. Like totems from an ancient tableau, these ‘presences’ project an elemental, timeless quality. In fact, Davidson has suggested that they would not look out of place in the Acropolis as weight-bearing caryatids.
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