Barbican, London
From Egyptian mythology to the bear pit of reality TV, this show captures a mere eight years of dazzling work from the restless American who lit up LA before dying at the age of 32

A kid is being spanked across his mother’s lap, his face all scream and indignation. She’s blowing out her cheek with the effort and the wallpaper stripes march by as regular as her slaps. She’s looking out at us from the picture and her one hand raised could almost be waving hello. Everything is rendered plain as a picture book, with flat, coloured-in outlines and not much modelling. The longer I look, the stranger Noah Davis’s Bad Boy For Life feels.

The artist was 24 when he painted it. He’d already been painting seriously since his teens in Seattle. A year later he painted The Architect, in which the eponymous figure sits on the far side of a model of some grandiose architectural scheme, which looks like a pile of bricks set on a ziggurat. Based on a photograph of celebrated Black architect Paul Revere Williams, the work has him leaning forward, as if explaining his model to a client, but his head is veiled by swipes and drools of white on the painting’s surface, which dribble down over the model. There’s something cartoonish, like an exploded “thinks …” bubble, in the air between us and the architect, his thoughts and explanations spattering the air.