In the first volume of Marcel Proust’s epic novel, In Search of Lost Time (1913–27), the narrator famously tastes a madeleine dipped in tea, which transports him into childhood memories of the home of his Aunt Léonie in the French-countryside town of Combray. Vaginal Davis’s intimate works on paper—thirteen of which were included in this jewel box of an exhibition—function in much the same way as the cake: They are confectionary portals that transport the viewer to long-ago eras of now-forgotten actors, fictional characters, writers, dancers, and artists. Davis’s Aunt Leonie et Combray, 2019, for example, depicts Proust’s protagonist in washes of pink and gray against an abstraction of green foliage. Her eyes are weary and melancholy, as she perpetually suffered from various ailments. The work is rendered on a piece of found stationery bearing the name FONDATION D’ENTREPRISE GALERIES LAFAYETTE, just barely visible through the painted ground. The letterhead is from the OMA-redesigned art institution located in central Paris. The new design preserves the institution’s original nineteenth-century facade while featuring an ultra-contemporary utilitarian space within. Davis’s portrait did something similar in its bridging of past and present.
Bringing together works made between 2017 and 2019, this exhibition reflected Davis’s dreamy world of fainting couches and laudanum, klieg lights and close-ups, on-screen romances, curtain calls, gold diggers, snake-oil salesmen, parlor songs, illegitimate daughters, Ascension Days, and yesterday’s fan magazines. Some works, such as Davis’s portraits Cyd Charisse, Geordie Graham, Moira Shearer, and Raven Wilkinson, all 2018, were decidedly Fauvist. Each is a headshot-style, three-quarter rendering of its subject in high-key colors and bold spontaneous brushstrokes. And, like the imagery of les Fauves, these compositions reflect a heady, emotional, nostalgic worldview.
Importantly, many of the works were composed not of paint or other traditional art mediums, but of beauty elixirs, makeup, herbal tinctures, lotions, painkillers, and other tonics. The various combinations of these sundry elements produced a watery, primarily pastel palette that seemed to capture the deep emotional states of each female subject. For example, Her Cardboard Lover, 2017—which takes its title from a 1942 movie starring George Sanders, Norma Shearer, and Robert Taylor as star-crossed swells enmeshed in a comical love triangle—was created with watercolor pencil, nail varnish, lip stain, eye shadow, glycerin, hydrogen peroxide, witch hazel, coconut oil, cocoa butter, perfume, hair spray, Anacin Fast Pain Relief tablets, Excedrin Migraine & Headache tablets, Lydia E. Pinkham’s Women’s Compound and Health Tonic, and a late-nineteenth-century herbal potable marketed to alleviate menstrual discomfort. Other pieces incorporated perfume, rouge, Aqua Net Extra Super Hold hair spray, mandrake, henbane, datura, and Iberogast herbal gas relief, among other natural and man-made ingredients. Davis’s kaleidoscopic mediums are like magical potions, meant to alter consciousness, induce fertility, sedate, soften, lighten, tighten, contour, and hold.
While the artist, like a grand witch, offers remedies for resilient women, “female troubles” were, nevertheless, a running subtext of this show. Many of Davis’s characters—women in love, either thwarted by vanity or adrift in longing—play out tiny dramatic episodes of lives both luxurious and flawed. Stylistically, her pictures recall the lavish interiors of Florine Stettheimer, the dynamic figures of Sonia Delaunay, and the weirdly disfigured heads of Hannah Höch. Yet Davis’s ladies, made with exotic powders and glamorous unguents, are hers alone. The originality in their making belies the wistfulness and nostalgia of their subjects, and the artist asserts that picturing the female is always, first, an aesthetic proposition.
— Catherine Taft