'Women & Men'

About

            Kevin Low is one of those people with an over-abundance of talents. He's a fine, but largely unrecognised, author of complex prose filled with beauty and darkness. He takes startlingly good photographs: haunting close-ups of china figurines that make the domestic seem agonised or carnivorous and bizarre snapshots of arranged insanity.  He was, for several years a photographer of stage performances: the lighting, the precisely chosen moments, the drama.

            In Women And Men it seems that Kevin has brought all these strands together in one resonant collection of painted images. (He paints, too - of course... ) Here we see figures caught in moments of intimacy and confusion. There is a domestic familiarity in some of the nudes, something early morning and blurred. In other frames the silliness, the passion, the obsession and failure of sex all riot about. Bodies retreat, turn, shift, present themselves, with and without balloons.

            Kevin's viewpoint is photographic, it picks the angles, the moments, it doesn't judge. But there is drama here, too. The fall of light is theatrical, cunning. Sometimes bodies have partners that are visible and simple, sometimes they seem to be making love to shadows, being preyed upon by shadows, even devoured. The brightness of skin seems to flare up out of liquid darkness. And behind each human drama lies a backdrop, a wild blending of night and the blood red one would find in Goya, in a closed eye facing light. It could be the colours of sex, love, anger, death - the joy of these pieces is that Kevin sets the scenes, conjures the cast and leaves us to decide.

            Once you've seen his women and his men you won't forget them, they are insidious as dreams, as fragile, tender and bleak. AL. Kennedy.