Julian Rowe
Notes Towards a French Opera
19 January to 8 March 2024
Opening: Friday 19 January 5 - 8pm
School Gallery is pleased to present Notes Towards a French Opera, an exhibition of new constructed paintings by Julian Rowe. The pieces correspond to the four acts of an imaginary opera, inspired by four historic fairy-tale-like stories. Rowe’s work has developed from a sculptural exploration of repetition and randomness, into a multidisciplinary engagement with weighty, and even epic, narrative themes drawn from history and literature. Such ambition is unsustainable without a pinch of irony, and his work is underpinned with hints of sardonic humour.
The four stories that have influenced the work for Notes Towards a French Opera are; The Beast of Gévaudan, an unidentified creature that terrorised a region of France during the 18th century causing many deaths; The tale of Bluebeard, thought to have originated in the medieval serial child-killer Gilles de Rais; The Comte de St Germain, a mysterious nobleman alleged to be immortal; and the ill-fated Elephant of the Bastille, a massive sculpture commissioned by Napoleon, which was intended to be cast in the bronze from captured cannons, but only ever existed as a full-sized model made of plaster and wood.
The constructed paintings are seen as ‘sets’ by the artist. Drawn from the stories but not illustrative of them. Rowe has stated “As a child I was given an old book of fairy tales dating from the 1930s, memorably illustrated in a Beardsley-esque style. Although I did not know it at the time, several of the stories were derived from folk tales interpreted by the French author Charles Perrault, and what has stayed with me is the blending of darkly “gothic” narratives with luminous French Baroque settings. This combination of dark and light that I find so fascinating seems to me to be uniquely Gallic, and distinct from the more earthy “gothick” that developed in English and German culture.” These four stories gave Rowe the four “acts” of the non-existent opera. Each “set” is constructed around a staircase in the shape of a double helix; the stairway is based on a beautiful cross-section drawing by Nicolas Le Camus de Mézières, an 18th century architect of the French Enlightenment.
Julian gained a BA (1st Class Hons) in Philosophy and Art History with the Open University (1984), and MA in Fine Art with Distinction from the University for the Creative Arts, Canterbury (2010). He has shown widely and undertaken several public commissions. Recent shows include: Simon Patterson and Julian Rowe, SCHOOL Gallery, London; Walking in Two Worlds, Carn Gallery, Caernarfon and Oceans Apart Gallery, Salford; Le Fantôme de la Peinture, Rezdechaussée, Bordeaux; Gestures of Resistance, Romantso, Athens; It’s Too Soon to Say, Surface Gallery, Nottingham; Cherry Time, Elysium Gallery, Swansea; Cathedrals, Musée des Beaux Arts, Rouen; I'd Like to See the Governor Now Please ... or Whoever is in Charge, Parfitt Gallery, Croydon.
Prizes include: Painted Surface Open, Nottingham; Quay Arts Open, Newport IoW; Discerning Eye, London. Publications include: a contribution to Earthworks, by Andrew Kötting, Badbloodandsybil); The Folkestone non-
linear para-spectrometry field study, UCA; Capriccio, Chrome Green.