Giulia Lallo
Catalogue essay for Peter Davidson, Drawings, 2026
Peter Davidson’s abstract drawings begin with a set of simple parameters: a pen and a page. Although these tools act as a set of confines or strictures–Davidson limited by the narrow scope of his pen on paper–the apparent simplicity of these instructions, the pure and elementary state of these edifices, also allow for a myriad of possibilities to occur. As Davidson’s pen glides across the page, he agitates the very bounds of drawing, pushing at the margins.
Davidson’s interest in rules and parameters, and his desire to break them, holds resonance in automatic drawing. Hailed by André Breton and the Surrealists for its ability to tap into the unconscious, to reveal hidden truths, one is ‘instructed’ to let go of conscious thought, drawing instead what comes to the fore from the depths of the unknowing self.
Through this act of disconnecting from corporeality, of letting the unconscious mind roam freely, allowing the pen to move effortlessly across the page, Davidson unlocks abstract plains, incoherent landscapes and unknown voids. These abstract fields, themselves indiscernible, dissociative from a specific referent in nature, allow us to project our own thoughts and feelings, desires and yearnings, onto the page. There is a moment of fusion between us and Davidson then, as we too let go of conscious association, allowing the marks to conjure our deepest unknowns.
A fluidity defines Davidson’s drawings then, where the line itself becomes a vehicle for play, for movement, for discovery. This, in many ways, contrasts his early career as an architect where the line, at the mercy of his architectural whims, was rigid, geometric, static. There was a sharpness. It had a purpose–to support structures, to uphold buildings of scale, to mark monumental time. To disperse of its innate function then, the line is freed, unshackled. Now organic in shape, it flows, bends, meanders, quivers. It is liberated and nondeterministic. Yet, there is still a permanence to its presence, as the ink seeps into the paper and creates its lasting impression.
A duality emerges in Davidson’s work–instructions to be broken, parameters that inspire limitlessness, a line that is at once present yet permeable and fragile. And it is this duality that is in part autobiographical–the line, the drawing, bridging Davidson’s career as both architect and artist.