Masked and obscured figures, some with elongated necks, peek through an intricate, abstracted, multimedia narrative that hints at a nautical, contemporary re-imagining of Henri Rousseau’s lush, fantastical jungles. Bold orange and oceanic blue lines mingle with halyard to guide our eye around the massive canvas, a repurposed sailcloth that’s weathered fierce storms across continents and harbors stories of spiritual enlightenment.
At more than nine-feet high and more than 14-feet wide, Reid Stowe’s Untitled – Sail floods a back wall at Chase Contemporary‘s spacious SoHo, New York, flagship. A full room of the gallery is transformed into a decades-long journey into the singular life and transcendent visions of the 71-year-old coastal North Carolina native, who logged a staggering 1,152 consecutive days at sea and worked alongside masters such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, who gifted Stowe a portrait in 1985.
Stowe’s first solo exhibition, Oceanic Feeling, opens today and is on view through April 16 at Chase Contemporary. These mostly medium- and large-scale mixed media paintings demand your full, in-person attention, as every inch of canvas is layered with imagery, textures, and insights into Stowe’s seafaring triumphs and turmoils, and spiritual awakenings. Many were begun aboard the schooner Anne, built by Stowe with the help of his family and friends, rolled up and brought back to Stowe’s Chelsea studio, where they were completed decades later. Untitled – Sail, a mixed media and collage on sail cloth, was executed between 1984 and 2018, underscoring Stowe’s deep commitment to his inimitable and elaborate creative process. Like his ongoing mystical encounters and seafaring adventures, Stowe’s art is in a state of perpetual evolution.
The name of the show is borrowed from a 1927 letter written by French novelist and dramatist Romain Rolland to Sigmund Freud after reading the founder of psychoanalysis’ The Future of an Illusion, exploring reasons of religious desire. Rolland coined the phrase to refer to mystics such as Hindu spiritual leader Ramakrishna.
Walking through the gallery last Saturday after the exhibition was installed, Stowe marveled: “It’s totally fantastic and elegant. And it’s shimmering.”
“There’s much more than meets the eye on multiple levels,” Stowe told me. “It’s all tied into my life, and I just want to make it clear that there’s no artist like me, before me, in the world. And it has to do primarily with the fact that I went into meditation for 846 days and never saw another human. There’s no one who’s done anything close to that. No one can name a time in their life when they haven’t seen another person. I went into a place with my mind that no human has ever gone into, but it had to be supported by my super athletic ability, constantly. But in that realm of clarity, I learned the things that I can share that are beneficial to mankind, and all of creation. I see creation so tied into mankind that I can’t just single it out and save mankind. I used to pray for mankind. And I realize, wait a minute, I’ve seen things here. It’s for more than mankind. It’s a lot of work.”
Our mood shifts dramatically as we confront a series of medium-scale monochromatic works that challenge our depth perception and perspective. The First Flag on the South Pole and the Starship Schooner Anne (2006-2022) draws us into Stowe’s connection between the open sea and outer space. The labyrinthine mixed media canvas eschews the figurative in favor of geometrically-inspired complexity that generates an array of optical and conceptual effects.
“Most of my figurative work is me experiencing my things or experiencing myself eternal,” Stowe said.
We dive back into a trance of tribalism and spiritualism, mesmerized by the prominent masks dominating the mixed media on board diptych Dynamite Bite (1984-2019), forming a 72-inch square. The Pop Art influence, a celebration of the 1980s heyday of the East Village art scene, isn’t lost over the 35 years Stowe spent perfecting this fierce, playful, and spirited work that incorporates visual representations of Anne, a recurring motif in his work.
Passersby are compelled to stop as they’re greeted by Magic Cleat Picasso and the Primitives (1976-2019) in the window of 413 West Broadway. Myriad self-referential elements collide, from another representation of Anne, to reclaimed wood performing as a totem, to plays of perspective that invite us into new dimensions, spiritually and visually. Perfected over 43 years, the endurance of this work is conspicuous and manifold.
“I was always clairvoyant, always seeing things, always having things happen. Every day, one after the next, little things, big things, always happen. I’ve had these mystical experiences my whole life that have driven me to be able to share that and give it to people lost at various levels,” Stowe said. “I was 20 years old and building my first boat, which was going to be the smallest schooner to cross the Atlantic Ocean. I heard responses, and they said to me, ‘we know you’re going to be able to do whatever you want to do.’ I learned how to heal. When I spent 1,152 days at sea, I was, in a sense, healing mankind, not just opening a new door of perception about where things could go, but actually the beginning. I learned that I was healing in a big way. The spirit of mankind and a lot of people aren’t really aware of the subconscious and what’s there. When you identify with yourself on a higher level, you realize, ‘I’m more like an eternal being.’ And not just this short period of time, but that realm out there where I spend a lot of time.”
You may not achieve union with or absorption into the Deity or the absolute, but spending time with Stowe’s work will certainly enhance your appreciation of his mystical and artistic voyage. Besides, these awe-inspiring works are open to vast interpretations and require no additional reading or research to appreciate their aesthetic achievements.
Stowe, through his unrivaled artistic representation of the intersection of mysticism and sailing, owns the imagery and the narratives. Again, we’re reminded of Rousseau, who said: “When I go out into the countryside and see the sun and the green and everything flowering, I say to myself, ‘Yes indeed, all that belongs to me’.”
