Cassandra Seltman on the plumbing paintings of Harry Davies
IN DRAINAAGE, HIS debut exhibition at Ulrik gallery in New York, painter Harry Davies sought to rethink the dynamics of hydraulics and logical systems. Pipes serve as invisible conduits in the network of the city -- buried infrastructure that promises smooth flow, containment, and control. But the pipes of Davies's paintings are bad diagrams. Like Marcel Duchamp's Network of Stoppages (1914), they form a warped infrastructure of painterly forces, bringing a certain disenchantment to bear on the hubs, flows, and spaces of logistical capitalism.
Davies's canvases are composite surfaces where various techniques -- painting, photography, drawing, taping -- jostle for space. Against blocks or washes of bold primary colors, pipes and plumbing parts suggest narratives within and between paintings. Much of the plumbing appears suspended, dislocated from any stable architectural base, a system untethered from utility or site. The fixtures -- nozzles, hoses, faucets, and clamps -- are laser-printed from Davies's photographs and assert themselves with forensic precision. Their clarity and indexicality render them incompatible with the ambiguities of the painterly field, which in turn registers their intrusion ambivalently, neither absorbing nor outright rejecting them but instead creating a forced contiguity. This tension reaches a critical density in one congested zone of Housing (all works 2025), where multiple regimes of mark-making -- not only photography and painting but also a photographic image of a single brushstroke, as well as a smudge of literal dirt -- are compressed into a tight spatial syntax.
In Coupling, much of the canvas is covered in a deep violet. The eye is drawn to a small but detailed laser-printed copper valve out of which pours a stream of peat brown, which gives way to a matte, horizontal swath of the same color. The flow abruptly becomes a brick of shit that extends the width of the canvas, interrupting the narrative logic of the painting with a blunt slab of brown. The title raises a question -- where is the couple? And what kind of couple is this -- mechanical, conceptual, chemical? A semitransparent line, created with a bamboo stick, vertically dissects the canvas. If the painting is read from bottom to top, the jet appears to penetrate the faucet, and the brown brick becomes a reservoir of force. At the bottom of the painting, the apparent background and foreground swap, as the violet briefly blocks out the bamboo line, spoiling our pursuit of a continuous z-axis.
Like Isa Genzken's Basic Research (1989-91), the painting has a quality of transcribing something via viscosity, frottages that record on a surface. Both bring a kind of gravitational research to color-field painting; it's not that they escape into a weightless realm or alternately cling to the "real world" but rather that they perform experiments that reveal the entanglement of material and symbolic forces. Genzken makes her paintings on her studio floor, and Davies likewise works from above, laying his paintings flat on a table and only moving the canvas to the wall if he needs the paint to drip. In Coupling, this produces a grid of drips on the side of the canvas: one of the many ways the painting seems to defile -- to shit on -- the heroic, gestural pour of paint in all its masculinity and expressive purity. Like the work of Ull Hohn, which combines the idioms of two beloved fathers -- the squeegeed abstractions of Gerhard Richter and the lowbrow populism of Bob Ross's landscapes -- Davies's work compounds legacies in a way that challenges their sanctity, thwarting while appreciating their seemingly incommensurate ideals.
Davies shares with minimalism an engagement with the rhetoric of power and the violence of infrastructure. Untitled depicts a kind of piss stream in contrast to Coupling's shit pour. Highly saturated red horizontal strokes cover the canvas, over which flows a vertical wash of toxic yellow, evoking spillage and chemical exposure. Three pipes are imposed -- vertical, diagonal, and curved like a hockey stick. The pipes are impossible by the rules of classical perspective, rendered as if seen from multiple vantages at once, inverting our fantasy of fixed perspective and throwing the viewer into motion instead. With its delicate and diaphanous layers, thinned-out brushstrokes, and matte finish, this painting is perhaps most closely in dialogue with Harvey Quaytman's tactile minimalism, one of Davies's prominent influences. There's a strange, sickly eroticism, visual heat without release. The pipes, which appear soiled in other paintings, seem to have cleaned themselves off in this one, but at the price of this noxious neon remainder.
The pipe, the central figure in these paintings, presents a bare minimum of signification. Davies cultivates a mood of nothing much, which serves as a defense against the spectacular insatiability of the screen -- a reluctance to be captured photographically, optimized, and initiated into the universe of the endlessly equivalent. Nothing much to see here -- except the qualities of one's own attention. Yet the paintings deliberately fall short of minimalism's cool detachment. The work makes use of falling short, as a way to love one's symptom -- that is, to make paintings smudged, dirty, and handled, which betrays the artist's tactile investment in his materials. Davies often mixes his paints himself with alternative binding agents like beeswax, which gives the surfaces an inconsistent and lived-in quality.
Standpipe Valve Displacement is reminiscent of Lee Lozano's ecstatically rendered industrial objects. It sustains a similar sexualized motion, an ejaculatory painting that suggests a narrative about what happens if you stimulate the valve. But a valve is a very different object from a wrench. If Lozano has shown us the tools that extend the hand and manipulate material by force in all their sexuality, productivity, and dumb masculinity, Davies shows us the parts of the system where movement is permitted or restricted through mechanism or gravity, the places that regulate, modulate, and channel libidinal flow.
The show included two paintings, Caput mortum and Caput mortum, clamp, that take their name from their dominant mud-brown color. Caput mortum ("dead head") is a Latin term used originally in alchemy to name the useless remainder of a chemical operation. It is also the name for an ancient color used in Egypt for funerary art and in Rome to paint the robes of religious figures and exalted personages, later taken up by the Romantics for atmospheric landscapes and by the German expressionists for its somber, earthy quality. Iron oxide (rust) is the residue of the process of oxidization, which links the alchemical term to the pigment name. In the 19th century, it became one of the first pigments made from an industrial by-product. These histories can't be far from Davies's mind as he returns to this residue that blurs nature and industry, reverence and waste, alchemy and infrastructure.
The title of the show is lifted from the closing monologue of Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood (2007), in which an American oil tycoon played by Daniel Day-Lewis explains the logic of extractive capitalism based on a relationship between surface and depth: "Those areas have been drilled. [...] It's called drainage, Eli. See, I own everything around it, so of course I get what's underneath it." The show can be seen as a response to this formulation. Davies undermines the assumption that surface control guarantees subterranean access. Perspective folds, vanishes, or multiplies. The works present an infrastructure where nothing indexes properly, and everything leaks. What happens after everything has been drilled? The paintings offer a model as much of drainage as of accumulation, where residues, dermic fragments, and spatial conundra build up.