Peter Davis is one of a group of young British painters who quickly came to prominence in the early 1990s. Their work was fresh and immediate, and, with the prime concern of investigating the language of painting in late Modernism, was a welcomed alternative to the narrative and representational zeitgeist where paint was a used to describe or illustrate stories.

This exhibition is Davis’s first at FRED, and brings together a new body of abstract process paintings that continues his exploration into formalist values in painting; and its promises and shortcomings, both as part of the current debate in contemporary art, and a broader art history.

Davis makes luminous monochrome paintings, and uses extremely simplified means to achieve what are highly emotional and subjective representations. What has always been of the utmost importance to him is the purity of the mode of production; the immediacy of the gesture; and the notion that the gesture is infinitely repeatable. He is trying to achieve as much as possible visually with as simple procedure as possible. The process is straight forward, but the resolution is not, because other qualities inevitably creep in during the making and extend these possibilities. Every painting is the product of a lot of decisions that become part of Davis’s vocabulary.

Davis paints on MDF or aluminium panels, which he has prepared at a car-spraying workshop. These are sprayed and lacquered, and baked and polished to give a smooth and very shiny surface. In the studio he applies paint to them with a roller then takes it off with a squeegee, in one movement. And if nothing comes of it, it is rollered on again and taken off until a point is reached that satisfies his critical eye. “This may happen on the fifth attempt, or the eightieth, or not at all if I’ve got my colours wrong.”

The earlier paintings were simple top to bottom drags, where the bottom two or so inches were painted so that the process was identifiable – Brice Marden, in his early work of the 1960s and 70s, often left this area bare. Davis’s movements gradually became gestural, and the work less austere, more decorative. “It was a battle not to get people to see them as too sterile.” At the time he was taping up the canvas in a grid, knowing that it would start to leak and break down, but this soon became constricting; and after seeing Rauschenberg’s erased De Kooning drawing, and John Cage's automobile tyre print, the idea of making images by removing paint rather than adding it excited him. And, after listening to the minimalist composers such as Steve Reich, Philip Glass, and Terry Riley, Davis re-examined his own practice: “the only way I could continue to make abstract paintings was to set myself up with a similar set of rules”. The goal has always been to make expressionist paintings, but expressionism with a knowledge and love of minimalism.

The combination of chance and the mechanistic, systematic process helps Davis distance himself from the position of the ‘authoritative’ artist. The highly polished surfaces deny the viewer any need to assign any literal meaning to the work, and alert us to other processes of interest to him; more especially that which transfers the painting from the studio to the printed pages of a catalogue. “Even some of my heroes suffer when you finally see their work in the flesh, after first meeting it all shiny and lacquered in book form. My paintings are almost reproductions before they're reproduced.”