The show opens with Davis’s early work, some of which is precisely that. Looking at reproductions, I’d been eager to see “40 Acres and a Unicorn” (2007)—a twist on Reconstruction’s failed promise of “forty acres and a mule”—but, on closer inspection, its fidgety modelling of a man’s face revealed an important caveat to Davis’s skill, which is that he wasn’t a portraitist. What’s a delight, though, are the rival tendencies on display in the first room. You can see a lunge toward van Gogh in the thick, swirling brushwork of “Mary Jane” (2008), and an out-of-left-field gesture in “Nobody” (2008), where Davis does a riff on a Malevich square, in purple. Then there’s a little thunderclap of originality: “Bad Boy for Life” (2007). Squeezed into a room with candy-striped wallpaper, a woman raises her arm to strike a boy on her lap. The first thing you’ll notice is her mouth. She doesn’t have one. The body horror turns absurd when you see that the child is dressed like a naughty jockey, wearing a gold suit and leather riding boots. The painting could be about the transmission of violence across generations, but it has all of the moral weight of a circus tent. Like much of Davis’s best work, it creates ambivalence through a specific stylistic trick: arranging blurred or roughly painted figures on a crisply delineated ground. The people always seem to be both of this world and the next.