Dominique Knowles: Impressions of Desire

When I introduce Dominique Knowles' paintings to someone, I describe them in terms of poetry. As a poem uses the specific arrangement of words to conjure an imaginative awareness of experience, Knowles' paintings are composed of velvety, atmospheric space in a range of hand-mixed ruddy earth tones and smeared, dragged textures. A poem says, "I want.”1

Any hint of figuration in paintings by Knowles appears at a distance and emerges as if glowing, backlit through the fuzzy expanse of a desert dust storm. Often, there is only the faint notion of a horse or a man placed at the center of the composition, enveloped in large ochre swathes of wiped, fluctuating brushwork like smeared honey; or wind. In his recent paintings, each titled My Beloved, Knowles summons the impression of a figure. Like reaching for the outlines of a lover’s face quickly receding from the shore of the present, only the general idea remains. The isolated feeling of his figures, which many have compared to the forms found in early cave paintings, speaks to a desire to comprehend man's unknowable, innate mysteries. When no discernible figure is present, tufts of an auburn abyss extend throughout the canvas, filling a void with the texture of radio transmission static.

Knowles' work is usually prefaced by the fact that the artist, born in the Bahamas in 1996, is also a dedicated equestrian. The intense bond between Knowles and his first horse, Tazz (given to him by his grandfather at the age of nine), the subsequent death of this animal companion in 2021, and the memorializing of this relationship –– has precipitated a series of exhibitions composed as spiritual environments. Recent canvases shaped like altarpieces or boxed into votive wooden frames present a more overt invitation for introspection.

Knowles' insistent reproduction of the figure of a horse reminds me of a letter from the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke to the young Viennese concert pianist he called "Benvenuta," in which he introduces the mental exercise of "in-seeing" as part of his search for the divine in all creatures:

...Can you imagine with me how glorious it is to in-see a dog, for example, as you pass by it––and by in-see I don't mean to look through, which is only a kind of human gymnastic that lets you come out immediately again on the other side of the dog... What I mean is to let yourself precisely into the dog's center, the point from which it begins to be a dog, the place in it where God, as it were, would have sat down for a moment when the dog was finished, in order to study it... and to say that it was good...2

That the death of his horse has prompted Knowles' search for the divine is strange for many to grasp, yet falls nothing short of the humanizing of Jane Goodall's glossy-eyed subjects or the heartbreaking interior world of a donkey in Bresson's 1966 film Au Hasard Balthazar. Ultimately, the erotics of a bond like this is a proxy for more significant questions at hand: What does it mean to create a profound connection with another being? And what happens to that connection when it is cut short? Like a poem says, “I want,” for Knowles, each painting is a statement of desire, a gesture of insurmountable longing.

–– Lola Kramer, New York, February 2024

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1 Louisiana Channel, “Eileen Myles Interviewed by Linn Ullmann: A Poem Says 'I Want'” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCnKGl2YDto, published November 16, 2017. See also: Afterglow: A Dog Memoir (UK:Grove Press, 2018).
2 Rainer Maria Rilke, letter to Magda von Hattingberg, February 17, 1914, included in Rilke, Rainer Maria. “Ahead of all parting: the selected poetry and prose of Rainer Maria Rilke.” United Kingdom: Modern Libr., 1995.