Jeff Davis Solo Show
Curated by Grida
Color: 1995-2025

The Architecture of Color

Jeff Davis builds quiet structures with color. Tracing invisible rules with the tips of his fingers, he rewrites the order of light and color. He has devoted his life to calling forth possibilities, one by one.

Born in 1972 in Arlington Heights, Illinois, Davis studied painting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he absorbed the disciplines of minimalism and systemic thought. From Josef Albers, he learned the logic of color; from Sol LeWitt, the beauty of systems and completion; from Donald Judd and Frank Stella, the power of structural simplicity and flatness; and from Bridget Riley, the vibrations created when color and form collide.

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His beginnings were traditional: paper, ink, printmaking, painting. But in the early 1990s, encountering early digital tools like Photoshop and Illustrator, Davis began composing color and structure directly on the screen. At first, digital sketches were only preparatory steps toward physical works. Yet by 1999, as digital printing technologies matured, he realized that digital works could stand as finished art in their own right.

At the same time, he became fascinated by systems where chance and structure coexisted. Starting with Excel spreadsheets to experiment with random combinations, he later discovered the Processing programming language, a turning point that allowed him to build systems where the drawings could happen by themselves. Davis became a painter who thought in code.

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His algorithms are not rooted in complex mathematics. They rely on simple integers, arithmetic sequences, and basic true/false operations. Within these narrow frameworks, unforeseen encounters emerge, subtle, spontaneous, and endlessly variable.

Color, too, is never isolated in Davis's work. It is not merely a visual element but a structural unit of meaning. As Albers famously said, color never appears as it truly is. It constantly deceives, shaped by the colors around it. In Davis's hands, colors do not exist alone. They touch, repel, blend, and reshape one another. Each interaction rewrites the experience of the whole.

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The colors Davis builds live within the architecture of digital light. Each screen is composed of countless pixels, each a tiny blend of red, green, and blue light. Unlike traditional pigments, which create color by subtracting wavelengths, digital screens add light together to produce color. Yet in Davis's work, digital colors lose their mechanical coldness. They breathe like paint. His surfaces pulse with warmth and depth, blurring the line between the virtual and the tactile.

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For Davis, color is not emotion itself but the order that emotion passes through. His compositions hold the weight of colors influencing one another, of light and shadow, warmth and coolness, folding together into layered structures. The same piece can feel different depending on the day, depending on the viewer. It is not the work that changes, but the chord it strikes within us.

His paintings are the language of structure, the poetry of order, the systems of color. His world is quiet yet trembling. Subtle differences and repetitions create a slow, magnetic movement that stirs the senses without ever shouting.

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Davis collects, assembles, and shapes these movements. Within them, color becomes a universe again, expanding endlessly yet always anchored by the clarity of his vision.

This exhibition presents a culmination of Davis's three-decade journey across color and structure, from painting to algorithm, from the hand to the code. It is a testament to the order he has found within the vastness of color, and the worlds he has built by bridging the material and the immaterial.

Here, color does not simply decorate space. It constructs it. Here, code does not replace the artist's hand. It extends it.

And within this quiet architecture, we are invited to look again at color, at light, at the hidden orders that shape our perception.