Page 4 - Eva Bosch: Shoes and Stars

!e Death of Alexander’s Lover

)is is not a painting of an historical event, it is a painting where history
is being remade through dreaming. A small +gure at bo*om right,
reduced to an archaic outline, raises her arms to claim your a*ention and
to announce the story in the arena behind. On the orange disc, that
slowly reveals itself to be a large body with Miró-esque horned head,
Bosch has arranged her personal archetypes; a snail shell, a green +gure
with its shadow-self close behind, an antelope from prehistory, a blue-
black feminised vase form, a howling dog, and a sleep ing body under
a hand-woven blanket.

)e tempo of the painting is estab lished through the use of curves,
an arched outline that suggests the beginning of a circle, a cycle, that is
never completed. It is in the curve of the snail shell, and in the spiral
within the shell, it is in the arch of the antelopes back and the belly of the
dog. It is in the crescent of the horns. It stops short of being a complete
circle in the bu*ock-thigh of the vase +gure. Even the disc of the orange
arena is interrupted, prevented from being complete. All of this is set
against an in+nite deep blue back ground smudged with stars, or possibly
teardrops. )ere is a tenderness shared between the forms; where they
overlap, they caress through tone and painter’s touch. Where the forms
are adjac ent, they hover tentatively, just ahead of touching; look at how
that vase shape is poised, equidistant between the antelope leg and the
slumber ing +gure, at how the green +gure reaches forward through
its leaning. )ere are echoes within echoes everywhere taking you back
and back into a deep dream memory. )e dark red head of the sleeping
+gure is vital, it draws you in, it is heated with dreaming of everything else
in the painting, of shaping the dream forms.

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