So-called outsider art is commonly valued for its idiosyncratic character and an originality of spirit—and therefore of form—unspoiled by convention. And yet, truth to tell, much of what is presented under this rubric looks remarkably similar. Singular inventors at the level of, say, Helen Rae or Martín Ramírez are as rare in this realm as they are in the domain of academically trained professionals. But to bend familiar tropes and traditionsto recognizably personal ends is also the mark of a genuine artist. To their number we can now add Franne Davids (1950–2022), whose work Ricco/Maresca presented to the public for the first time in a solo booth at the Art Dealers Association of America’sArt Show at New York’s Park Avenue Armory and, immediately afterward, in a full-scale exhibition of six large canvases and fifteen works on paper at the gallery’s Chelsea space.
The paintings (all untitled and made between 1979 and 2018, but not individually dated) featured constellations of women, exotically garbed and sporting elaborate headgear, crowded into densely patterned nonrepresentational environments. I couldn’t help but think of the all-female worlds conjured by English spirit medium Madge Gill or self-taught Algerian painter Baya, who was championed by Picasso and the Surrealists in postwar Paris. Davids’s relentless mark-making might recall the horror vacui that is so common among the art of outsiders—Adolf Wölfli being a prime example, as is Gill. But there is something fundamentally different from such artists’ methods in Davids’s painting process, and therefore in her works’ surfaces: She does not treat her canvas as a simple plane to be filled laterally with adjacent marks or color notes; instead, she works in depth, building up layer after layer, endowing her compositions with a rare chromatic richness and the sense that every aesthetic decision has been deeply contemplated, rather than being the product of some psychic automatism. Some of the works on paper, which appeared to be studies or sketches, showed Davids’s method clearly, with figures broadly adumbrated but minus specific details—which is to say, the images were composed as wholes, not as concatenations of parts.
So-called outsider art is commonly valued for its idiosyncratic character and an originality of spirit—and therefore of form—unspoiled by convention. And yet, truth to tell, much of what is presented under this rubric looks remarkably similar. Singular inventors at the level of, say, Helen Rae or Martín Ramírez are as rare in this realm as they are in the domain of academically trained professionals. But to bend familiar tropes and traditionsto recognizably personal ends is also the mark of a genuine artist. To their number we can now add Franne Davids (1950–2022), whose work Ricco/Maresca presented to the public for the first time in a solo booth at the Art Dealers Association of America’sArt Show at New York’s Park Avenue Armory and, immediately afterward, in a full-scale exhibition of six large canvases and fifteen works on paper at the gallery’s Chelsea space.
The paintings (all untitled and made between 1979 and 2018, but not individually dated) featured constellations of women, exotically garbed and sporting elaborate headgear, crowded into densely patterned nonrepresentational environments. I couldn’t help but think of the all-female worlds conjured by English spirit medium Madge Gill or self-taught Algerian painter Baya, who was championed by Picasso and the Surrealists in postwar Paris. Davids’s relentless mark-making might recall the horror vacui that is so common among the art of outsiders—Adolf Wölfli being a prime example, as is Gill. But there is something fundamentally different from such artists’ methods in Davids’s painting process, and therefore in her works’ surfaces: She does not treat her canvas as a simple plane to be filled laterally with adjacent marks or color notes; instead, she works in depth, building up layer after layer, endowing her compositions with a rare chromatic richness and the sense that every aesthetic decision has been deeply contemplated, rather than being the product of some psychic automatism. Some of the works on paper, which appeared to be studies or sketches, showed Davids’s method clearly, with figures broadly adumbrated but minus specific details—which is to say, the images were composed as wholes, not as concatenations of parts.
With one exception, the large paintings at the gallery had no evident narrative content. Rather than illustrating actions, they presented gatherings of figures—as if the members of some fantastical court had assembled for their group portrait. In the one canvas that was somewhat different, a woman on the left—apparently unclothed, since the entirety of her white body lacked the lush ornamental patterning of the costumes worn by other characters—knelt before a pair of upright ceremonious beings on the right, with some kind of unidentifiable structure (an altar?) between them. The small works on paper were more various in subject. A couple were absent figures altogether, describing instead the kind of architectural settings in which Davids’s protagonists might be placed. The show also contained more fanciful, lighthearted tableaux: One featured a human posing between a pair of snowmen, while another presented a blue phantom riding what appears to be a giant white cat.
Whoever Davids’s women are, they seem tremendously important, existing only to display their grandeur. For some reason I kept thinking of the orientalizing illustrations of the story of Queen Esther—the biblical heroine who saved the Jews of Persia—I’d seen in old books in childhood. Davids, who was Jewish, might well have seen similar imagery. But what she specifically had in mind we may never know; the gallery website mentions “writings—journal entries, letters never sent, and prose poems,” but these were inadvertently destroyed by her relatives. In any case, this artist, who was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic—but was enabled by her family to paint out her visions in the privacy of their Connecticut basement—knew that her art had value. She would sometimes abscond from the domestic nest and make her way to New York, where she was sure the Museum of Modern Art was hoarding paintings it had stolen from her. I wouldn’t be surprised if they turn up there someday, legitimately acquired.
