"David Noonan's recent paintings retrospectively capture the transitional mood of this period in their tenebrous representation of various phenomena reminiscent of the particular period. He combines such divergent cultural motifs as European villas, young people in elaborately designed tunics, and Indonesian shadow puppets that suggest a host of possible narratives that viewers must create themselves."



-- Dominic Molon, Pamela Alper Associate Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, from his catalogue essay accompanying the exhibition 'David Noonan - They Became What They Beheld, Foxy Production, New York, October 2004.

Noonan paints with bleach on black canvas to extraordinary effect. By extracting rather than applying pigment, he produces images including towering trees, a pheasant, a kimono's patterning - with a remarkable tonal range and an almost photographic depth of field. The individual works taken together seem to suggest troubling, almost cinematic narratives. In the exhibition's centerpiece, a young man and woman clad in highly patterned tunics form a yin-yang shape; while in other works they appear in moody ethereal interiors alone or together. Are we revisiting a long-extinguished romance, or witnessing a vibrant contemporary one? Dark, haunting external point of view images of the Swiss painter Balthus? villa suggest ominous events within. Owl (2004), Noonan's new film, observes these nocturnal creatures, expressing their timeless associations with wisdom, death and chance.

In this exhibition, continues his fascination with owls as a potent symbol whose meaning is different for every culture but which generally has connotations of the occult. His representations of them come from many sources. The white plastic owl sculpture that occupies the centre of the room combines two representations of owls from different countries, different centuries, different materials and very different creative processes. The larger, more rustic figure comes from a wooden, roughly hand-carved Burmese original, many centuries old while the smaller, more refined object that the large figure supports comes from a 19th-century English porcelain original. Noonan puts these two nominally similar but culturally antithetical phenomena together and casts them as a single form.