Eye Magazine

There are drawings for an as yet unpublished book collaboration with photographer Jocelyn Bain Hogg, and an unhinged narrative entitled ‘A Mad Story’. However the world of client-driven illustration and commercial ‘creative’ blather is never far away, as you can see in Davis’s fake ads, which incorporate the logos of big brand names such as Tiffany and De Beers. You can sense Davis’s empathy for this world in the series of drawings entitled ‘Why you should attend the seminar,’ whose ‘remix’ of contents were taken from an ‘arrogant, badly written, terribly designed brochure’ that dropped through Davis’s letterbox one morning.

The line in the sand of the show’s title is of course the line between art and illustration, but in Davis’s world this is more like a circus performer’s slackwire on which Davis variously hops, pirouettes, trips and dangles.

The enormous affection in which Davis is held by UK designers is demonstrated by a series of twenty posters by practices such as Why Not, NB, A2, Morag Myerscough, Browns and Atelier Works. Despite the posters’ disparate and virtuoso range of typographic styles, they are united by similar source materials – a series of handsome, if lonely portraits of Davis striking a pose in a variety of guises, complete with wigs and masks.

‘Line in the sand’ continues at Ginza Graphic Gallery (GGG) in Tokyo until 28 February 2015. An enjoyable 80-page catalogue for the exhibition, with a long interview / conversation with Tim Rich and an essay by John O’Reilly, was designed for the occasion by former Eye art director Stephen Coates.

Eye is the world’s most beautiful and collectable graphic design journal, published quarterly for professional designers, students and anyone interested in critical, informed writing about graphic design and visual culture. It is available from all good design bookshops and online at the Eye shop, where you can buy subscriptions and single issues.