Lesson (two figures)

Davies has exploited his medium in this work by placing two figures in a situation in which their apparent conversation is all but silent. One male, slightly taller, seems to instruct the other, but their garb and accoutrements are so similar as to make them seem Doppelgänger. Where the effect of Bucket Man is one of iconographic complexity, Lesson is by contrast a haunting essay in economy of means. A few features – grey, nearly conventional clothes, pale flesh, rhythmically repeated ladder forms draped over the figures – bind the two men together in a powerful statement of mysterious privacy, a privacy emphasised by the large base, which frames the figures and keeps the viewer at a distance.

Graham Beal, 1997

Entry taken from Robert and Lisa Sainsbury Collection 3 volume catalogue, edited by Steven Hooper (Yale University Press, 1997).