Between 1539 and 1543, Hernando de Soto led a motley band of Spanish conquistadors on a fatal expedition through the American southeast, battling against the environment and the indigenous peoples in a quest for the fabled fountain of eternal youth.
It’s the sort of story that might make for a great movie. What it doesn’t make, though, is a particularly successful series of paintings, at least as conceived by Verne Dawson – full of scenes of naked natives bathing in moonlit lakes, or wandering with animals though dreamy, Edenic landscapes, or even jarring symbolically against distant, high-rise buildings. Throughout, the essential problem is that these sorts of romantic, state-of-nature motifs simply come off as too unreconstructed, too instantly familiar – even if Dawson is, presumably, trying to be ironic, along with all the winsome wistfulness.
Dawson’s painting style is partly to blame. The American artist has been doing the whole fantastic, folkloric thing for a while now, in a delineated, crisp and vaguely Bosch-like style. In these latest works, though, his technique has become looser, more scrubby and sketchy – with foliage reduced to hurried dabs, and quick figures that, from a distance, shimmer sensually against bright blue skies. The largest work, ‘Nude Beside the River’, especially, feels like a departure, with the whole thing dissolving at the edges into fidgety blots and swoops of colour. And yet, there’s a nagging feeling that all of this newly discovered freedom and spontaneity is simply another sort of stereotype – an extension of the paintings’ depiction of innocent primitives, and their sensuous, liberated, unaffected ways.
Gabriel Coxhead