Gerald Davis
For Hillary Diptych
2006
Oil on canvas
165.1 x 213.36 cm each |
Themes of sexuality, longing and lost innocence run throughout Gerald Davis’s work. Salvaging from his own personal experiences, Davis’s paintings often capture the turbulence of youth, championing all its awkwardness, embarrassment and sentimentality. Executed with the chastity of cartoon illustration, Davis’s fairytale images are cringe-worthy disclosures of preteen puppy-love, weaving shame and humiliation into Freudian celebrations of identity and acceptance. For Hillary is presented as a dyptich. One panel tells Davis’s true 7th grade tale of primping for a (never received) hand-job for which he devised an ill-crafted mirken; the other canvas is a representation of the desire and fear the girl inspired in him.
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