Introduction by Pafo Gallieri
When looking at Kevin’s latest visual productions, one might feel like they are staring into a world of electronic impulses, pixels and meshes. Those elements, now far from the digital world where they belong, have been reshaped back into the traditional medium of Painting, like in some sort of anachronistic game. This process is the result of the time that the artist had spent wandering in the virtual world.
Having studied Painting in the early ‘80s and then embarking on a studio Painting practice into the early ‘90s, he started working with 3D software whilst creating both physical and digital art eventually focussing on the latter. He has produced works ranging from video art to most recently NFT’s. It was only a couple of years ago that Kevin felt the need to return to Painting. He is now operating like software but instead of the usual hardware is supported by thick layers of oils and acrylics, brushes, paper and canvas. In this universe of ‘hand painted CGI’ we come face to face with a final boss from a ‘90’s arcade game. Unnervingly he is staring with all his thirty eyes just moments before the fight kicks in, or we could get lost in a surreal desert from the latest VR headset. These elements are transfigured through his ‘Bad Painter’ treatment and there is often an unsettling feeling in this peculiar bit-fauve style. Overall, the techno-pop component that comes through these works is due to the influence of video games and probably before that comics had a hand in informing his aesthetic. On the other hand, the increasing degrees of abstraction often tend to almost destroy the representation and unveil the author’s intention of criticizing the digital world, a place in which he felt to some degree caged. In this sense, these works ultimately could be seen as an attempt to reclaim reality through Painting and can be read as a declaration of creative freedom.
Artists Bio
Kevin Rowe was born in London and grew up in the militarised area of Aldershot and Farnborough. Educated in state schools his early work experience was mainly in construction and factory environments alongside people from different cultural backgrounds. His personal genetic and cultural heritage is a mix from Western and Central Asia, Britain, Ireland and Scandinavia.He lived in the West of England in the ‘70s returning to London to go to Art School then to a studio in Limehouse, East London to continue Painting into the ‘90s then moving into filmmaking.
He’s spent extended periods exploring Asia, North Africa, Europe and Central America experiencing different cultural forms and how they mix via migratory flows, forming his view of the world and his image making.
In more recent years he has worked in and taught film, video, performance and digital animation. This complexity of shared and personal history drives his personal experience and his Painting that he returned to with renewed passion in response to the pandemic and wearying of digital media technology. He works from a studio in a converted factory in Stamford Hill, London.
Artist’s Statement
For me Painting is an attempt to articulate experience I don’t have words for. The Paint needs to take over without too much interference from me in order to make an outside of language commentary. It doesn’t mean that the subjects and events that might appear in my images are outside language but the feelings those things generate are. The paint might appear coarse and uncontrolled but that’s a misconception. I make both random and reasoned decisions, take chances with impulsive control giving rise to unpredictable and interesting results. Denying and allowing, braking and accelerating. This is how it seems to work as an attempt to navigate the tension between construction and chaos.
Putting experiences and perception of the World we inhabit into the act of Painting, exploring stories as paths snaking through a landscape, joining, crossing, intersecting and branching.
These Paintings and drawings are explorations of the vast complexities of the teeming nest of the World. A Trauma Garden as an entangling mesh enveloping and spitting out seeds from a Lonely Planet. The World teems with burgeoning life in seemingly perpetual crises; these contradictions and precarious combinations drive my image making.
Forms sprout and figures roam splintering landscapes under crowded skies searching for something they don’t know. Monsters from the Id Dreaming in Public.