Icarus No.1 2018

Curator: Stepping up to Owen Gent’s "Icarus No. 1" from 2018, I’m immediately struck by the strange mix of longing and premonition hanging in the air. Editor: Yes, there's definitely an unsettling balance at play, isn't there? The pale, almost desolate colors mixed with such a dramatically rendered figure leaping off the cliff edge… What do you make of the composition? Curator: It's funny, my first thought was a visual poem of daring—and impending doom. He's using watercolors here, I should mention, giving a hazy, dreamlike quality. That figure mid-leap – is he flying? Falling? – is beautifully ambiguous, don’t you think? It’s so evocative, feels like Icarus forever suspended between hope and disaster. Editor: Precisely. The superimposition of forms—is it another figure, an angel, perhaps? It fractures the reading. Semiotically, it introduces doubt into Icarus's supposed flight, rendering his ambition frail through that doubled presence, hinting instead at earthly restriction. Curator: Ah, but what if it's not doom? Maybe it's the echo of bravery, a refusal to stay put, to push beyond the boundaries we set for ourselves. Maybe Owen Gent’s speaking to that universal desire to touch the sun, consequences be damned! I always find it more compelling to consider how much beauty can reside in our follies. Editor: I agree about that universal drive to defy gravity and convention, but look at how he utilizes the limited color palette, so earthy, except for the flash of red along the "wing"—a color of warning? To me, it highlights the fatal hubris and potential catastrophe more than freedom. It speaks of inevitable limits imposed by both physics and perhaps fate itself. Curator: Perhaps. But maybe fate isn’t some fixed script. Maybe we write a little of it ourselves each time we take flight, even if we tumble in the end. The power of this Icarus for me is how it hangs suspended between interpretation— between gravity and grace, between freedom and a tragic flaw. Editor: True, and perhaps that suspended state—structurally expressed through Gent's striking composition—is where the essence of the work resides. It prompts us to dwell on our own precarious leaps into the unknown.