Gabriel Lewis (b. 1999)

Gabriel Lewis’s Satyr Outside a City is a masterful treatment of a traditional subject in the classical manner. Yet the hues of Gabriel’s oils glow with a radioactive vigour that is distinctly modern: the intense reds and yellows from the fiery background radiate across the canvas, shining off the satyr’s chest with an almost fluorescent luminosity. One of Gabriel’s newly completed pieces, the painting demonstrates his high accomplishment in a variety of genres. Elements of still-life, landscape, and portraiture form a composite whole that attests to Gabriel’s creative aptitude for composition and his extensive experience working in these traditional genres. 

The Bacchic atmosphere and strong, bodily dominance of the satyr call on Rubens’s (1577-1640) baroque tradition of fleshly bodies, evocative landscapes, and fluid, drunken bacchanals. But Lewis’s satyr is more individually distinct than Rubens’s bacchic figures: the intensity of the satyr’s gaze and his jutting, foreshortened elbow demand the psychological weight of an individual portrait, recalling the portrait traditions of Van Dyck (1599-1641) or Titian (1488-1576). The foray into still-life, with a crowded ledge of grapes, chalice, and tipping wine glass (a cheekily anachronistic touch), further brings a subtle realism to the painting. But those tantalisingly luscious grapes, almost as enticing as Caravaggio’s (1571-1610) in his Supper at Emmaus (1601), are there to heighten that sense of delicious abandon and (glass-tipping) disorientation that comes from wine.

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For Gabriel’s Satyr explores the dichotomies inherent in the Dionysiac. The red-hot glow toning the satyr’s muscular body hints at an indomitable strength; but as the satyr points towards the burning background, the fiery landscape shows how danger and intemperate destruction are not too far away. The satyr, a disciple of the ancient Greek god of wine, is a figure of reckless abandon and heightened, religious lucidity; it relishes in cheeky play but often descends into a terrifying violence. The satyr’s eye in the painting sparkles with this whimsical ambiguity: a playful brilliance that is piercingly intense; a magical knowledge that is unrevealing. Euripides summarises the dualistic qualities of Dionysus best in his Bacchae: 

Διόνυσον, ὃς πέφυκεν ἐν τέλει θεός, 

δεινότατος, ἀνθρώποισι δ᾽ ἠπιώτατος.

                                       (Euripides, Bacchae, 860-861)

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[Dionysus, son of Zeus, is by turns a god most terrible and most gracious to mankind]                                        

                                                       (trans. by John Davie (London: Penguin Books, 2005), p. 150)

Gabriel’s Satyr Outside a City is hanging next to Cauchoi’s (1850-1911) Nature Morte à la Brioche, itself a study in the decadence and vanities of indulgence. The two paintings aesthetically (in their sombre, rich pallets) and thematically complement one another across the wall. We are extremely excited to show Gabriel’s new painting in the gallery!