Richard Davidson’s elegantly selective paintings anatomise corporate man by coolly cataloguing his wardrobe and accessories.

Davidson depicts the indispensable uniform of the power dressing ‘city’ business man: business coat, smart shoes, attach case, and so on, either in isolation or inseries, to create the visual itinerary of an identity, a portrait in discrete and impersonal objects.

Abstracting these objects from their context of use and rendering their pristine state, as if they were sitting in a shop window or sailing down the production line, Davidson releases their latent strangeness.

’I paint images of recognisable objects on isolated, unadorned grounds’ says Davidson. With their…

Richard Davidson’s elegantly selective paintings anatomise corporate man by coolly cataloguing his wardrobe and accessories.

Davidson depicts the indispensable uniform of the power dressing ‘city’ business man: business coat, smart shoes, attach case, and so on, either in isolation or inseries, to create the visual itinerary of an identity, a portrait in discrete and impersonal objects.

Abstracting these objects from their context of use and rendering their pristine state, as if they were sitting in a shop window or sailing down the production line, Davidson releases their latent strangeness.

’I paint images of recognisable objects on isolated, unadorned grounds’ says Davidson. With their raison d’etre removed, Davidson renders the object visible for the first time.

It’s a condition of clarity, absurdity and surprising vulnerability. For Davidson, himself a former solicitor, there is a hint of nostalgia and pathos in these deadpan images.

Like a contemporary development from Magritte’s bowler hatted men with umbrellas, these works tap into the melancholy of objects, subtracting any more individual traces of identity. Affectionately ironic, these are coolly powerful paintings, object litanies that gesture to the artifice and constrictions of power.

Davidson is a graduate of Wimbledon School of Art, has had many group and solo shows, and won the BHF Bank small painting competition in 1998.