Noah Davis at the Barbican

Sometimes painting really does, as the saying goes, approach the condition of music. Today I had that feeling pretty well all the way round the Barbican’s exhibition of work by Noah Davis, the African American artist who died of cancer aged 32 in Los Angeles, where he’d spent his last years setting up the Underground Museum, a place for showing art — not just his own — to people who’re not exposed to it on a regular basis. It occupied four adjacent storefronts on a street in Arlington Heights, a historically black and Latino/Latina district in Central LA.

Thinking about his own work, and his desire to “make something normal”, he said: “Does it have to be about hip-hop and that stuff to get people interested?” But also: “I wanted it to be more magical, not stuck in reality.” So you get a man reading the paper, or people splashing around in a pool, or three young people clustered in a doorway. Normal. But because of what Davis brings, painting over a base layer of rabbit-skin glue like Mark Rothko did, creating a kind of transparency even when the paint is dense, moving blocks of colour like blocks of sound, also magical.

There are explicit references to music in some of the paintings, like the one above, which is called “Conductor”; it stopped me in my tracks. Magical realism right there. He painted it in 2014, the year before he died. Or there’s one called “The Year of the Coxswain”, from 2009, which shows oarsmen carrying a boat out of the water; behind and alongside them is a black-clad figure holding a trumpet.

If you want to see and know more, there’s a Barbican trailer for the exhibition here and an Art News piece here. I’m afraid you only have until May 11, which is this coming Sunday, to see it in London. Sorry about that. Thereafter it can be seen at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles (June 8-August 31).

I found it unforgettable. I could show you another picture, probably the three young people in the doorway, but because “Conductor” struck me so hard, here’s a closer look.