The paintings of American artist Ben Cowan (Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1985) live through gesture, at an intellectual crossroads — often an ironic one — that runs through the object, illusion, and the transcendence of perception. Echoing the dynamism and compositional richness of Gothic art, his fake windows and altarpieces, strikingly original and chromatically intense, offer art and its icons a thoroughly alternative reading.

Fragment and bodily gesture thus come to define a pictorial path that becomes a small opening onto the world. The gaze and the interlacing of hands — now joined in prayer, now pierced in the sign of the Passion — mark the boundary between a modern renaissance and an openness to the complexities of the present. Both the gestures of Mary and the evocative nod to painters such as Michelangelo Merisi, known as Caravaggio, accompany a pictorial journey that lives on perception and color.

As André Chastel wrote: «The oldest and most important [treatise on gesture in art] is owed to the jurist and court counselor of Treviso, Giovanni Bonifacio. The work is titled “L’arte de’ cenni, con la quale formandosi favella visibile, si tratta, della muta eloquenza, che non è altro che un facondo silenzio” [The Art of Signs, through which a visible speech takes shape, dealing with mute eloquence, which is nothing other than an eloquent silence]. The title makes the subject of the treatise clear, and through its ornate verbal inversion underscores a purpose that is not to study the phenomena of expressive gestures, […] but rather to expand the repertoire of bodily signs carrying meaning, and thus capable of being combined into a kind of coherent paralanguage — or rather, a rhetoric of non-verbal communication. The dedication specifies: «to princes, who by virtue of their dignity make themselves understood through signs rather than words». (Chastel; 2001)

Moving within a space of observation that invites viewers to immerse themselves in plays of shadow, between what the works reveal and what they conceal, Ben Cowan engages with a universe of new painting inhabited by the ambivalences and disillusionment of the contemporary moment. Evoking glimpses of a past made of portraiture and solemn painting, his brush weaves the coordinates of a horizon in which the seductive play of the fragment takes center stage. Seduction, corporeality, and a veil of mystery merge with flat fields of color, in a clear nod to an art history and its gestures learned by heart.

Article by Floriana Savino