In light of a transfiguration, these three paintings visualize an emotional landscape full of reverence and sincerity. The cosmology of Knowles’ relationship with horses – particularly in mourning and death—often reveals his work as a sensibility. Like a medieval grave where horse and rider bones have been placed together in burial, it’s difficult to separate loss, devotion, and intimacy from this relationship. Through the canonical figure of a horse’s ghost, Knowles’ subject matter expresses a philosophy. Out of principle, landscape offers a connection to the ground as being a sanctuary. The horse and rider become metaphors for a sense of aliveness and the eternal, ceremony and spirituality, portal and horizon, rewilding and cohabitation.
Physicality is always a part of Knowles’ work. The exhibition space asserts itself with dappled light coming through a photograph on the window and Japanese incense engaging the sense closest related to memory. His arch shaped canvases act like holy architecture, mimicking an altar or the cavernous ceiling of a church. Ochres, umbers, siennas, and green earths, kept shadowy and tonal, harken to a bucolic prehistory. The embodied experience of painting repetitive, singular brushstrokes becomes synonymous with brushing a horse’s back. Like a Caspar David Friedrich painting where the motion of waves crashing against rock brings us closer to the sublime, Knowles’ abstraction suspends the less comfortable emotions associated with grief and care.
By exhibiting these works publicly, there is an implicit call for communal engagement. Knowles’ rejects dissociation, offering an alternative ethic to a culture refusing to acknowledge death of any kind, let alone that of an animal companion. Life with a horse requires a balance of listening and acceptance, integrity and freedom. In Knowles’ work, that dance is harmonized with the mystery of a divine encounter.
at Hannah Hoffman Gallery, Los Angeles
until March 29, 2025
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