"Michael Davidson manages to infuse gestural abstraction with a fresh and pure visual nerve. His large, open canvases invite the viewer to contemplate space in a new manner, minimal iconic and organic shapes shifting across an amorphous ground. Deceptively simple, they deliver a kind of visual haiku, a brief moment of elegant seeing."

Donald Bracket, The Financial Post, September 1997.

"..... Lighten up guys, it's only painting."

Martin Coomer, TimeOut London, England. July 2001.

"..... Yeah, right."

MD

Michael Davidson trowels, smears and sometimes brushes oil paints mixed with cold wax onto canvases that end up being predominantly white, with tantalizing under-tints of salmon, sienna, blue, grey and green. However, it's the artist's discerning use of meandering lines and judicious dabs of Japanese red that cut through what might otherwise be a painterly dance of the seven veils.

Betty Ann Jordan, Toronto Life Magazine, February 2002.

"There and then the electric people might invent the railway, just watching the lid lifted by the steam."

Paul Muldoon, From "The Electric Orchard", 1973.

Early Spring

'Building Picturing' features the work of sixteen painters whose approaches range from geometric abstraction to keen observation, from lyrical inventions with mark and color to restrained distillations of the landscape. These diverse painters are linked by their emphasis on the painting as a made thing, the result of an encounter with both tactile and formal constituents; paint and canvas, as well as color, shape, and placement. Neither hermetic nor naīve, these artists do not ignore the last few decades' challenges to paintingšs languages and ideologies in order to practice a nostalgic revivalism. They are fully aware that their images speak within a broader field that includes 'high art,' news media, and cartoons, but they do not accept equalization as a premise, nor do they approach painting as a collage of readymade styles. Instead, they invest their very craft with meaning. Never simplistically painting 'about painting,' they use the terms endemic to their practice to achieve the human qualities of curiosity, experiment, desire, and commitment.

Vittorio Colaizzi, Virginia, US.

The Next Station
The curator's enterprise involves the interweaving of authoritative proposition, text, and appropriate image-work. The alternative is the survey selected with a journalistic eye and ear to the ground, because it's there. Translinear is an artist-generated undertaking cast in a different model. Painter Michael Davidson wanted to know more, and to construct an exhibition in which he would participate and take a peripheral view. As George Kubler wrote, "the most valuable critic of contemporary art is another artist engaged in the same game". The artists selected have an affinity to Davidson's practice but were not chosen because they follow a certain stream or demonstrate a type. Instead, he was drawn to the uncompromising aspects of individual practice by peers, mentors, and senior figures, artists whose age difference spans four decades. During the incubation period, work changed, the exhibition structure evolved and the initial notions of "linearity" -- examining the structure of painting -- opened up. After all, Davidson put "trans" in front of "linear". No longer was this a question of examining painting through the paradigms or conversely, the labyrinth of abstract subspecies. It is a proposition-turned-anteroom, through which ideas move between image and the non-objective (as many of the "transinear artists" have done in their own work and careers), and where others -- essayists and curators -- can enter and participate.

The engagement and willingness to particpate is an act of faith through which we may witness a transfiguration or transubstantiation. But it is near to impossible to convince the disbeliever. Miracles, like beauty, are in the eye and mind of the beholder. They can be documented -- and lead to beatification and sainthood -- but this does not necessarily explain faith, or faith in painting.

Ihor Holubizky, Translinear 1999

"Somewhere in those pages, between Miro and Wilfredo Lam, where you might find Arthur Dove or the early Motherwells', or in the reach from Ryman '58 to Clyfford Still of the same era..... I think that there is language, to a large degree untapped, and yet so convincing in terms of durability, that like the best of music, it seems to underscore a sense of higher purpose. I find myself searching these paintings over and over again."

MD

"Can painting be an aphrodesiac, a covert pleasure, a veiled vice? If so, Michael Davidson is leading a secret life with paint.

In his most recent show (KMG), he exercises some pretty high-strung visual nerves. Davidson's internal meanderings with abstract painting have a guileless quality; you can see his painted layers even if you're not schooled.

The active surfaces, though, do convey a stabilized state and sense of resolution. Works like "Lock And It Will Open" and "Sympathy Vibration Fortress" illustrate this perfectly, employing buttery, mayonnaisey paint in composition at once lush and restrained."

Si Si Penaloza, NOW Magazine, February, 2002.

The isolating of emphatic gesture or gestures on an often otherwise "empty" canvas.... was of great importance to Joan, often overriding considerations of conventional "composition". In this sense she is an anti-formalist, in that.... the marks or the gestures become her "subject" to be looked at and read for itself, not the means toward an end, as part of a merely well-made abstraction. The gestural mark, in all its gravity, ambiguity and raw power.... (announces) the passionate, refreshing, shockingly "undigested" look of some of her paintings"

Nathan Kernan, on Joan Mitchell, April 2002.