Young Punks

Crescent Art Centre, Belfast

In 1991, Anthony Davies had an exhibition at the Orchard Gallery, Derry, entitled 'A Tale of Two Cities'. As part of this show, a series of large pen and ink drawings, assembled in the form of a mural was shown. It was called 'Games that People Play' and included a street scene of children at play, as well as an archetypal politician before a bank of microphones, painted gable walls, helicopters, blocks of flats and security personnel.

In this exhibition however, Davies has focused on the plight of urban youth, observing that such children so often have adulthood prematurely thrust upon them. While these paintings contain certain insignia and emblems which directly relate these images to Northern Ireland, Davies is concerned with the universality of the problem. In all modern urban centres, children can have their childhood cut short, inheriting the preconceptions, outlook and possibly the prejudices of their elders. These works are observations of archetypes, not portraits, and are an intuitive and poignant response to a facet of our society Davies has continually drawn towards.

Evident is a feeling of impotent outrage against the influences which have dispossessed this lost tribe of youth of their childhood innocence. We can see the markers of change; the toddler who has been given a flag and a bonnet; the children who assume the masks of different identity as a 'game'; the youths who have consciously taken on the aggressive trappings of assumed adulthood.

However, in presenting this series of gouaches, Davies has typically refrained from passing judgement on what many perceive as a 'social problem'; he leaves us to muse upon any perception of threat or sympathy, balancing a heroic quality of free spirit against seeing these children as victims trapped by the dictates of environmental pressures.