Noah Davis, Barbican review - the ordinary made strangely compelling

In 2013 the American artist, Noah Davis used a legacy left him by his father to create a museum of contemporary art in Arlington Heights, an area of Los Angeles populated largely by Blacks and Latinos. But his Underground Museum faced a problem; it didn’t have any art to put on display and none of the institutions approached by Davis would loan him their precious holdings.

The solution? Davis set about creating clones of famous artworks that feature mass produced items. Collectively titled Imitation of Wealth (pictured below) they now occupy a gallery in his Barbican retrospective. Marcel Duchamp coined the term readymade for the everyday objects he chose to designate as sculptures simply by signing them. One of the first was Bottle Rack, 1914, and displayed centre stage is a facsimile of this (in)famous icon. Attached to the walls are strip lights mimicking a Dan Flavin installation; a vacuum cleaner and neon tubes replicate a Jeff Koons sculpture, while mirrors and a heap of sand recreate a non-site installation by Robert Smithson.

This wry dig at the myth-making which fuels the art market is pure genius. And the man responsible for revealing, with such wit, that the emperor has no clothes deserves admiration. The installation was a one-off, though. Davis is not a conceptual artist but a painter whose pictures may appear unassuming, yet repay one’s attention in spades.

There are similarities with the work of Peter Doig, Marlene Dumas and Luc Tymans, some of the best painters of our time, not because Davis copied them but because all work from photographs and, in so doing, explore the surreal potential of the frozen moment. Come to think of it, taking a banal image and transforming it on canvas into something special is not that far removed from transforming a banal object into an artwork. It makes the sculptures, which Davis referred to as his “ode to the bootleg”, seem less like a side show and more like an extension of his chosen process into 3D.

In his paintings, though, Davis focuses exclusively on the black experience. When invited in 2007 to take part in an exhibition themed “The peaceful household or lack thereof” he painted Single Mother with Father out of the Picture (pictured above right). The ingredients of the domestic scene are unremarkable, but Davis has tweaked them to create a sense of insecurity and unease.

Mother and daughter gaze warily out of the picture as though anticipating an unwelcome visitor. The mother sits in a floral patterned armchair; her body tapers rapidly from strong legs to a small head, which makes her seem both as solid as a rock and extremely vulnerable. Her daughter stands between her legs, naked but for white socks, knickers and a large plaster cast suggestive of both physical damage and emotional trauma.

Davis excels at this potent combination of the mundane and the unsettling. The girl in Mary Jane 2008 (pictured left), appears deeply uncomfortable. Standing open-mouthed in front of a hedge whose leaves look dangerously sharp-edged, as if cut from steel, she seems to be singing or reciting. Dressed in what looks like a Black Mammy outfit complete with headscarf – perhaps for a school play – she seems mortified to be type cast in one of the menial roles so often reserved for black actors.

1984-2009 is a portrait of his wife Karon. Based on a photo taken by her mother, it shows her as a young girl wearing a Hollie Hobbie mask for Halloween. Traditionally, the Hollie Hobbie rag doll wears a prairie dress and a bonnet framing her smiling white face. So we see a black girl hiding her identity behind an evocation of white settlers – trying to fit in maybe. No wonder the image seems freighted with disturbing implications.

She sits innocently on her bed in white striped pyjamas, but a dark shadow clings to her and spreads onto the pink wall behind like a premonition of trouble in store. She reminds me of the naked girl in Edvard Munch’s painting Puberty, 1894, who sits on her bed casting a similarly foreboding shadow.

The link may not be a coincidence since Davis was well versed in art history. He was especially drawn to Mark Rothko’s palette of bruised carmines, purplish browns and soft blacks and, as time went by, his backgrounds became increasingly fluid and painterly. Walls where the graffiti had been painted over with blocks of colour reminded him of a Rothko composition, and the man carrying a briefcase down empty streets in The Missing Link 3, 2013, seems to be walking through a Rothko-inspired cityscape.

1975 (4), 2013 (main picture), shows a black man reading a script in a studio where the wood panelling is as subtly coloured and beautifully proportioned as a minimalist painting. “I wanted Black people to be normal,” Davis once said. I take this to mean that he wanted more paintings to feature black people doing ordinary things – getting on with their lives.

The desire may seem simple yet it is revolutionary because, until now, black people have largely been excluded from the cannon. And by placing his subjects in settings reminiscent of famous paintings from the past, Davis is retro-fitting them, as it were, into art history.

Yet while he undoubtedly succeeded in normalising the presence of black people in art, his characters often feel singularly alone and out of place, as if forced to function in a world fashioned by and for other people. Davis was a huge fan of Paul Revere Williams, an L.A architect who designed homes for the likes of Frank Sinatra and Lucille Ball. Despite his success, though, Williams taught himself to draw upside down because he sensed that his white clients felt more comfortable sitting opposite him. His expertise did not make him one of them.

Davis died in 2015 from a rare form of cancer at the horribly young age of 32. He painted until the very end and produced Untitled (Walking Man), 2015 (pictured above right), one of the most haunting pictures you are ever likely to encounter. Based on a photo of someone walking past a self storage unit, it features a man so frail he appears transparent – a figure so insubstantial he casts the thinnest of shadows. Stooped as if beaten by life, he shuffles unsteadily along, one arm outstretched as if holding an invisible cane. Without him the picture would be a superbly nuanced abstract painting; with him it becomes a meditation on mortality and one’s passage through the world. A fitting memorial to a brilliant artist.

• Noah Davis at the Barbican until 11 May
• More visual arts reviews on theartsdesk