David Bowes at Annina Nosei - New York - Brief Article

Art in America, Sept, 2002 by Carter Ratcliff

David Bowes's paintings can be spacious and airy, yet even when they picture landscapes with distant castles and mountains, there is always the suggestion of a stage--and of a backdrop that could easily be moved closer. His figures have a theatrical air, especially the ones with the look of Pierrot and Colombine and other characters from the commedia dell'arte. Flirting knowingly with the decorative, Bowes often compresses backdrop and foreground, as in wallpaper, and there is a suggestion of fabric design in the way he repeats his motifs at intervals across the surface. In some pictures, patterns emerge. In others, pattern overwhelms itself. Figures, foliage and emblematic images of all kinds--banners, bits of masonry, the ace of diamonds---crowd one another with an intensity that pushes everything up to the surface.

Rather than indicate a light source, as a realist would, Bowes induces his colors to glow. In this exhibition, the dominant color was the luminous green of the leafy vines that spread over many of his canvases, sometimes obscuring nearly everything else. In the four years it took to produce the works in this exhibition, Bowes encouraged the decorum of the garden to become the exuberance of the rain forest--though it is a strange rain forest, where Pierrot and Colombine stroll at ease and architectural follies in the pastoral manner peek through the vegetation.

A brilliant painter, Bowes practices what might be called hieroglyphic figuration. With just a few strokes of a loaded brush, he can indicate an elaborately costumed figure or the sinuous gestures of a tropical vine. Of course, some renderings are more hieroglyphic than others. The larger the form, the more fully Bowes employs the familiar devices of figure painting. Modeling becomes a painterly caress as he gives volume to the voluptuous shape of the nude woman who, in half a dozen recent pictures, emerges from the forest shadows with a crown of flames around her head. Among this woman's distant ancestors are the muscular figures that populate William Blake's prophetic books. She is related, as well, to Venus and the Madonna. This feminine ideal embodies all the yearnings--from the sensual to the intellectual--that generate Bowes's distinctive utopia, a realm ruled equally by passion and refinement.