ART
Connoisseur of the inexplicable
RANJIT HOSKOT
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Kate Bowes' oils do not squirm uncomfortably or make token gestures of subversion within the four-edged field of the canvas.
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A nod to the masters: "I dreamt the cat was swimming", oil on canvas, 18" x 14".
KATE BOWES first showed her work in India in 1993, in Mumbai. The Scottish artist was living and working in Baroda at the time, exploring a richly promising but also potentially hazardous borderland between societies and artistic contexts. Her works, miniature in scale, seemed to be tokens from a reliquary, memoirs of war and sacrifice, shadow and fire. We asked ourselves whether they were miniature paper sculptures, complete in themselves; or painted maquettes, notations for future experiments in volume and surface. Eluding definition, these objects were suggestive of well-worn leather and wind-emeried rock, exquisitely evocative of lost worlds of sensation and ceremonial. They were at once abstractionist in effect and symbolic in tenor, conceived as stimuli to dream.
Radical departure
Viewers familiar with this early work will perhaps be shocked by the radical artistic leap that Bowes' recent paintings embody. These oils, done over 2004-2005 and currently being exhibited at Mumbai's Sakshi Gallery, are developed around the human figure: around portraits, personae and existential predicaments. A significant number of them seem to be self-images or heraldic substitutes for the self-portrait. The settings are allegorical, occasioned as much by direct personal experience as by an immersion in imagined scenarios. Bowes' mise-en-scene owes much to those masters of epiphanic strangeness, "Le Douanier" Rousseau and Magritte.
Importantly, Bowes' paintings do not try and escape the formal confines mandated for them by the history of the form: they do not squirm uncomfortably or make token gestures of subversion within the four-edged field where the painter must take up position and confront the harpies and sibyls of her imagination. Instead, Bowes simply steps out into the field and accepts its challenges, tuning its possibilities up to the pitch of substantial, memorable resonance. And these recent works, too, like their utterly different predecessors of 13 years before, are conceived as stimuli to dream.
The images that dominate Bowes' recent paintings suggest, very strongly, the search for a secret self. Consider the delicate yet formidable portrait of a woman in "Profile", on which is superimposed a bird-woman suggestive of an Egyptian goddess. Or "Chemical Brother", an extermination specialist who, though concealed within a chemical-warfare suit, is poignantly cruciform in gesture. The crises of a globalised planet are no longer out there or elsewhere; everyone is implicated in them to some degree, everyone is part aggressor and part victim, part violator and part martyr.
Bowes, in this reading of her images, may be regarded as Everyperson: she occupies various situations, trying on different postures. And while these paintings articulate a desire to seize the momentum of the present through pictorial parables, they also express intense privacies. So that, even when the figure seems public in its manifestation, animated in the role it has assumed for the moment, there is something curiously oblique and impenetrably private at the centre of the experience. The acrobatic protagonist of "Spot light" is aureoled by the glamour of the sensuous trapezist, is held in counterpoint by the far more homely figure of the gymnast-self in "She was happiest on her hands": both images seem to propose directions in life that could lead to the temptations of complacency, to the satisfaction of living inside one's own well-defined skin. In `The Signal', a figure waves a semaphore, isolated against the vastness, the impersonal beauty and glorious indifference of the natural world.
Bowes has become a connoisseur of the inexplicable: that which can be expressed, but not readily explained. In what may be thought of as an act of homage to Carroll and Magritte, titled "I dreamt the cat was swimming", she deploys a figure that is part feline and part human; the title, written across the picture surface, renders the occasion hallucinatory. Is this a speech act performed in the moment of dreaming? Is the speaker the swimmer, captured in mid-stroke and mid-metamorphosis? In "Home to roost", a group of birds perch on a woman, and on the floor around her, like curses finding their target or boomeranged desires, their wings folded, tails flourished in dignified triumph. The terror of ungovernable psychic forces that imbues these paintings is held in check by the tenderness with which the artist handles her oneiric tableaux.
The rising stars of the Paris scene in the first quarter of the 20th Century venerated the ageing Rousseau as an inspired madman, given to deliciously bizarre visions and gnomic utterances. Not one to disappoint his admirers, the Douanier once informed the young Picasso that the two of them were the only great masters of the period, "you of the Egyptian style and I of the modern". Perhaps Rousseau was not entirely crazy: Picasso's art, fierce and pioneering as it is, remains distinguished by a reliance on mythic energy and a tendency towards ritual stylisation, a bias towards archaic content and a continual reversion to classicisms arising in antagonism to contemporary experience.
Carnival of image-narratives
On the other hand, Rousseau's dream art, naοve as it may appear, took delight in the multiplicity of visual and conceptual sources that modernity made available; it broke all the rules and laughed at all the conventions, mixed the classical with the popular, the familiar with the exotic, and delighted in the production of a carnival of image-narratives. Rousseau's was a spirit that we now recognise, historically, as post-modern; but it captured and transmitted the shock, pleasure and explosively kaleidoscopic nature of modern experience far more acutely than the approved house styles of modernism could, with their inherently classicising tenor and unitary obsessions.
Bowes is, in Rousseau's special sense, modern rather than Egyptian: her art, although seemingly hieratic and gravid with myth on occasion, is characterised by humour and self-irony. This keeps her images in lively relay, as active elements of a process of viewing in which an updating of the relationship between art-work and viewer plays a key role. These images do not postulate themselves as absolutes, to be acclaimed or abandoned. Rather, they invite us to decipher them, but also to ask ourselves what decoding techniques we bring to the encounter.
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