‘Now is life very solid or very shifting? I am haunted by the two contradictions. This has gone on forever: will last forever: goes down to the bottom of the world – this moment I stand on. Also, it is transitory, flying diaphanous. I shall pass like a cloud on the waves. Perhaps it may be that though we change, one flying after another, so quick, so quick, yet we are somehow successive, and continuous – we human beings: and show the light through. But what is the light?’ - Virginia Woolf. Diaries. 4th January 1929.
Margaret Mellis and Francis Davison in Venice
Anyone lucky enough to have a Francis Davison on their wall at home, as I do, is living with what I can only call ‘the light of life’. I want to try to describe, as best I can, what this ‘light’ actually could be.
We need light to see and, because of that, we’ve tended to elide seeing with illumination, so much so that we used to think that seeing was a beam of light that came out of the eye and could physically touch what we saw. Belief in the Evil Eye and the Beneficent Eye was widespread, if not universal. It was only about four hundred years ago that scientists in Western Europe discovered how seeing actually works. They realised, ironically during the age we now call the Enlightenment, that the eye is a passive receptacle of rays and that no light comes out of it at all. As a consequence, many Christians have come to think, like their mother and sister faiths, Judaism and Islam, that the God they believe in cannot be seen. Looking has ceased to have any power on earth and anything spiritual has receded out of sight. In addition, we discovered that our eyes are limited in scope. Many things in the universe can only be seen with the aid of a microscope or telescope. Seeing with the naked eye has shrunk in significance. This has, overall, been bad news for visual art.
But this isn’t the end of a story. Raymond Tallis, the neuroscientist, philosopher and polymath, thinks that something does come out of the eye even though we can’t see it. Whenever anyone looks at us, we, more often than not, feel something. And these feelings can be very intense, among the most intense experiences of connection we ever have. We still tend to think of a look as a ‘light’ that comes out of the eye, and we tend, too, to associate this light with life, for this is the ‘light’ in someone’s eyes that goes out when they die.
This ‘light of life’, we now know, isn’t something physical, like a flame or a torch, not even a star, nor the one nearest to us, a sun. But it’s still ‘there’ in a real sense. What we seem to be doing, when we look into someone else’s eyes, and connect with them, is to share, for a moment, our separate consciousnesses, our individual self-awareness that we are both alive in this moment and that this moment is fleeting. We are back in Virginia Woolf’s eternal present in which we can only live but which we know, too, is forever passing – and we think we can see the ‘light’ that radiates within this exchange.
What is extraordinary and, as far as I am aware, unique in Francis Davison’s art is that he developed, over thirty years, a visual language that enabled him to play with and create this ‘light’, differently, distinctly and glowingly, day after day after day. But this is where this article becomes challenging – how can one describe in words a visual experience that reaches beyond sight?
Francis rarely said anything about what he was actually doing, even to me who possibly knew him better than anyone, apart from his wife, the artist, Margaret Mellis. He was not only chronically retiring; he had no patience with anyone who didn’t actually see what he’d done, freshly, without trying to categorize his work in terms of, for example, the historical development of abstraction from representation. He didn’t deign to explain anything, just as he didn’t date, sign or title any of his works. He hardly sold anything during his life, living, very modestly, with his wife, on the income her paintings occasionally brought and by selling eggs from the many chickens he reared.
‘The whole process is there, even what was cut out or what was used and discarded until something modest appears, a satisfactory balance, a stillness, a suggestive form.’
His art is about what do you do when you have nothing else to do, just live. Samuel Beckett, when asked why he wrote in French, not English, replied, ‘I wanted to impoverish myself further.’ Davison used the most basic materials, torn and cut, self-coloured, robust papers, used in packaging, never paint and brushes. Some of the marks on his collages look like brush-marks, and they are in the sense that they’re traces of paper left on the glue he applied (with a brush) to stick his papers together, which he subsequently tore apart. Towards the end he cannibalized old works to make new ones. That’s one reason why so much of his work is impossible to date; each piece is often the product of accumulated feeling and thinking over years.
‘A mess taking shape until something modest appears’ sums up his working method. What is exceptional about his work is that, while it remains a mess – he never smoothed anything out, or tidied up a corner or a tear – and yet it always resonates. Every fleck, every nick in Davison’s work is always meant. Nothing ends being left to chance, yet everything is made of chances. We are back with Virginia Woolf: the unintentional that ends by being intentional... the flickering lights of passing moments. They are every-where in Francis Davison’s art.
And there is another light that is also always present in his collages. No matter how bright the scatter of details, Davison ensures that each enhances the glow of the whole. If you put your finger over the black spot near the middle of the lower edge of the collage to the right and imagine a full white circle, the composition as a whole doesn’t blaze so brightly, though why would be impossible to describe in words. This overall ‘light’ is the other side of Virginia Woolf’s contradiction: the elusive radiance of the everlasting present.
The collages in this exhibition are all by Davison, and yet Francis himself is nowhere to be seen. He is, in a strange way, as he was in life, totally, almost furiously, self-effacing – and yet his works are entirely individual; intense, deeply felt creations, nothing else. We are left only with momentary experiences of living, which magically Davison has made lasting – to let the light shine through.
Julian Spalding is an art historian, writer, broadcaster and a former curator. An outspoken critic of the art world, he has frequently contributed to arts, news and current affairs programmes on radio and TV. Spalding was one of Francis Davison’s first critical champions, curating the artist’s sole lifetime retrospective at the Hayward Gallery, 1983. A fuller account of his friendship with Davison, the development of his work, and its unlikely impact on Damien Hirst appears in his professional memoir Art Exposed (Pallas Athena, 2023).
