Dominique Knowles

Dominique Knowles’s work occupies the spectral plane between dreams and waking life. The artist constructs his roiling landscapes from what he calls “a build-up of ritual, a sediment of memories,” circling recurring themes of devotion, alchemy, loss, and a heightened attunement to animal being. Knowles’s body of work often features paintings and works on paper that mourn his 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. The pull of death in arcadia seeps quietly beneath his ostensibly serene pastorals, haunting a genre typically concerned with nature’s cultivation and mastery. Knowles also reworks the historical 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.”