A Snail's Pace

An immersive magical realist dreamscape, Noah Davis’s A Snail’s Pace is among the legendary painter’s most captivating and enigmatic works. Executed in his characteristic painterly style, the painting demonstrates Davis’s masterful sense of composition and the depth of his art historical immersion. Davis depicts a scene of a Black figure riding atop a snail ensconced within an extravagant nautilus shell. The reference point comes from a seventeenth century nautilus shell by the Nuremberg silversmith Jeremias Ritter now in the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut. Davis utilizes this Wunderkammer object as an entry point into a fantastical world of his own imagining. The painting epitomizes the artist’s sense of his own practice: “I feel there is immense freedom in painting to create your own universe—if you don’t let ‘Art History’ or pretense get in the way. I’m actually not a big science fiction guy at all. I’m more of a sappy romantic. These elements of fantasy may arise from my need to ‘break the spell,’ or the constraints of art theory, and move more into the realm of mysticism” (N. Davis, quoted in P. Malavassi, “Noah Davis, So Magic, So Real,” in Noah Davis, eds. W. Fray-Smith, P. Malavassi, and E. Nairne, exh. cat., DAS MINSK, Potsdam, 2024, p. 55).

Blending the figurative with the abstract, A Snail’s Pace is both realistic and dreamlike. The gigantic snail, with its exuberant nautilus shell, takes up the majority of the composition. The large creature is placed within a blue void devoid of spatiality. The Black figure is mounted regally at the summit of the snail’s shell, confidently holding the creature’s reins. The slime trail, exquisitely painted with Davis’s signature loose, layered style, streams down the tableau while granting the figures a sense of progressive movement. While the shell is painted in meticulous strokes, Davis seemingly works in a method reminiscent of Mark Rothko or Peter Doig. The snail’s body is painted in vibrant gold leaf, applied by Davis’s wife, the artist Karon Davis. The inclusion of gold leaf provides a further art historical referent, recalling the illuminative intensity of Sienese and Florentine religious art from the early Renaissance. The blue background exhibits minute modulations of tone and shadow, providing a captivating backdrop to the shimmering gold.

The painter Marlene Dumas identifies how “Davis’s paintings are moving in many different ways. He remains actively present in his work, even if he takes you to places without him” (M. Dumas, “On Dingle Mother with Father out of the Picture, 2007-2008,” in ibid., p. 36). Davis’s choice of subject with A Snail’s Pace succinctly summates Dumas’s sense of his presence, the work bridging technical virtuosity with a fantastic, alluring subject. A year after painting the present work, Davis described in a lecture his conception of his narrative practice: “I wanted to create narratives that are based in—almost like a Fellini. You know Federico Fellini, the filmmaker? So, if you take—in terms of casting, finding these just really basic stories to tell that are about love, that are about death or so forth, that’s where I’m kind of going ... but I want it to be more magical. I don’t want to be so stuck in reality” (N. Davis, quoted in E. Nairne, “Noah Davis and the Magic of the Quotidian,” in ibid., p. 16). In embracing Fellini’s surrealist approach to narrative, where subjects are freed from the constraints of reality while still residing within an earthly realm surrounded by familiar symbols, Davis is able to compellingly construct an alternative to the art historical canon.

Painted in 2010, A Snail’s Pace comes from a seminal stage in the artist’s career. Davis had several breakout shows, including an important exhibition at Roberts & Tilton gallery on the theme of Richard Brautigan’s novel In the Watermelon Sugar. His son Moses was born soon after, while his first European exhibition opened in May. Davis also curated his first exhibition, Gray Day, with the theme centering on “the apathy of the present moment.” As Noah Davis’s close friend, the artist Lindsay Charlwood, notes, “2010 was a good year” for Davis, establishing him as one of the most influential painters of the day (L. Charlwood, quoted in H. Molesworth, “Lindsay Charlwood: Interview,” in H. Molesworth, Noah Davis, exh. cat., David Zwirner, Los Angeles, 2020, p 116).

The present work was included in the artist’s foundational posthumous exhibition in Los Angeles at David Zwirner and the Underground Museum—an entity founded and championed by Davis—in 2020. Curated by Helen Molesworth, an early champion and close confidant of the artist, each work exhibited was chosen for its importance in representing Davis’s singular oeuvre. Molesworth explains that “I tried to choose the range of styles of pictures so those who don’t know Noah’s work can see what he was up to. But these are really the paintings I love” (H. Molesworth, “Noah Davis: An Introduction,” in ibid., p. 9). Exceptional among Davis’s broader oeuvre, A Snail’s Pace aptly demonstrates the artist’s exceptional ability to create profound paintings whose solitary subjects provide multitudinous meanings. “His work offers an essential contribution to the development of twenty-first-century art, occupying a space in a progressive, figurative tradition that is neither purely expressionistic nor surrealistic, neither entirely romantic nor neusachlich” the art historian Paola Malavassi praises of Davis’s work. “It lies somewhere between all of these categories—between the real and the magical” (P. Malavassi, op. cit., p. 62).