Boo Saville “Chimera”

Maxwell Davidson Gallery/Davidson Contemporary

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Davidson Contemporary presents Chimera, a solo exhibition of paintings by Boo Saville. The exhibition marks Saville’s first show with the gallery and first in the United States. The show features a combination of color abstraction and monochrome figuration. The title Chimera references a female mythical creature, a hybrid of different animals. It can also be defined as an organism consisting of different genetic tissues, or any fanciful mental illusion or fabrication.

Here, the chimera reflects the duality of Saville’s two styles of painting in conjunction with and in opposition to one another. They are divergent models of aesthetic exploration, polar opposites or simultaneous opposites.

The so-called ‘monochrome’ works are chosen from a larger selection of images gathered from a simple Internet search. The paintings in this series emerge from a taxonomy of surface, time and energy and hope to inform the abstracts, which embody the same things. Those abstracts are pure color and stem from the artist’s own emotions. However, Saville removes almost any trace of the painter’s hand, inviting and provoking the viewer to project her own emotions and classifications onto the work.

Saville’s paintings seamlessly intertwine the emotional internal realm and the tangible external world. The divide between life and how we perceive it becomes manifest.