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Carr/Davidovich - 2

Davidovich's initial solution to this problem was to work as before on a stretched canvas which he then removed from the frame and placed directly on the wall. While the visual merging of the canvas and the wall surface pleased him, the jarring note suggested by the push pins, together with the need to cope with the sheer weight of the canvas, ultimately led Davidovich to the use of industrial tapes in various colors, materials and sizes in order to arrive at what was for him a satisfactory manner of evoking his ideas.

The earliest piece which Davidovich exhibited using tape was in 1971 in a group show sponsored by the Cleveland chapter of EAT at Lake Erie College in Painesville. In this spacious campus gallery, Davidovich was given a 15' x 35' wall. He covered it with alternating horizontal strips of white cloth tape, white paper tape and canvas painted with white acrylic in sizes varying from 4" to 15".

Without destroying the architectural entity, Davidovich was able to develop a composition based on the rhythmic repetition of the lines and planes of the joined and banded materials and to evoke a surface that was subtly modulated by the shifting play of colors and light which emerged from the differences inherent in the tape and canvas materials. Like the perception of the Pamplas [[Pampas?]], which is limited only by the physical limitations of the eye, the imagery of the wall at Lake Erie implied a potentially endless statement, inhibited only by the arbitrary dimensions of the format.