Ryan Joseph Gallery Presents:
Natura Naturans
A Solo Exhibition by Andrew Davis
May 2021
About Andrew:
Born in the Shenandoah Valley in 1987, Andrew Davis is a self-taught artist from Virginia. He attended Virginia Commonwealth University for Communication Arts in Richmond, VA between 2007-09. Andrew has been drawing and painting for 15+ years.
About the Show:
The "Natura Naturans" exhibition is named after the philosophical concept by Baruch Spinoza. Baruch argued that there is only one substance: the absolutely infinite, self-caused, and eternal. He calls this substance "God", or more broadly, "Nature." The phrase "Natura Naturans" is Latin for "nature naturing" or "nature doing what it does." Nature naturing, Baruch thinks, is a mode in which the infinite substance of nature expresses itself through action.
Carl Jung believed that myths and dreams were expressions of the collective unconscious and found representation in universal, archaic symbols. These symbols are primordial underlying forms, or archetypes, from which emerge certain images and motifs universal to human psychology. The idea of gods having anthropomorphic qualities and actions that represent human psychology, Andrew feels, can accompany and compliment Spinoza's concept of Natura Naturans.
Mythology is a collection of modalities that the infinite substance of Nature embodies in order to express itself. The interplay between gods and goddesses along with the underworld and the heavens greatly inform how they relate emotionally with people. In this series of paintings, Andrew explores the ways in which the human psyche can be recognized in the supernatural theater of mythology and, ultimately, in a larger synecdochic expression of nature.
Portraiture, in Andrew's view, is an attempt to find the mind's construction in a face. He prefers using portrait references from Baroque and Renaissance paintings and sculptures of mythological scenes. These were time periods of a renewed interest in Greek and Roman mythology and many skilled artists crafted those ancient stories with intense humanity. Andrew uses aspects of psychedelia, cubism, and surrealism to assemble these references within the composition of a portrait in order to explore human emotion in connection with mythological archetypes and, hopefully, their consequent natural modes.
