DOMINIQUE KNOWLES

— Anne Carson

Dominique Knowles’s work occupies the spectral plane between dreams and waking life. His debut at Greene Naftali expands the corpus of roiling landscapes for which his known, laced with figurative elements in what he calls “a build-up of ritual, a sediment of memories.” The Solemn and Dignified Burial Befitting My Beloved for All Seasons circles his recurring themes: forms of devotion, alchemy, loss, and a heightened attunement to animal being.

Painted in the French countryside, the new works on view mourn the artist’s late horse and lifelong companion. A painter, poet, and accomplished equestrian, Knowles grew up around the stables, and a reverence for the bonds that can form between species animates his work. Each expanse of stretched linen teems with his signature brushwork, both ethereal and grounded—whorls of thinned paint in an earthen palette of ochre, umber, moss, and sandstone red. Horses appear in schematic outline or partial silhouette; horizon lines pulse like waves on the sea; a human-like figure either exits or immolates in a wall of flames. The pull of death in arcadia underlies what one critic calls Knowles’s “necropastoral,” haunting a genre typically concerned with nature’s cultivation and mastery. ¹

Knowles’s painting practice also reworks the motif of the horse and rider: a staple in Western art from cave paintings to battle scenes and imperial portraits. Yet in his hands, those archetypes for nobility or state power “become metaphors for queer desire, or a quest for intimacy.” Knowles has likened the act of painting a horse to that of grooming one—the muscle memory of care and concern for another transferred onto the canvas. A 2019 video work, Tahlequah, touches on similar themes, taking its name from a grieving orca who traveled thousands of miles carrying her stillborn calf. Using found footage of this and other instances of empathic connection among animals, Tahlequah aligns with Knowles’s broader aim to dislodge the anthropocentric point of view. The paintings are a swirling lament for the kinship humans once had with other beings, and their hazy atmospherics—enhanced by the artist’s prescribed sepia walls and spotlit works—admit a surprisingly frank encounter with death and its attendant transformations. Knowles holds fast to the fact of decay while remaining alert to its cathartic release: “I would go into [it] thinking of a burial,” he has said of his process, “but it would come out a resurrection.”

^{1 Mark Pieterson, “Fielding the Necropastoral Exchange,” Texte Zur Kunst 131 (September 2023); citing a term coined by the poet and theorist Joyelle McSweeney.}