Exhibition - Past

In his new body of work, Michael Caines has been thinking about the pathological aspects of

compulsion and desire,and how our most shameful or hidden drives are perhaps also

the most generative, the most full of image. The little bat, he thinks, knows that he wants to

suck blood and neednot question that peculiar pleasure. The artist, on the other hand,

ties himself in knots over what he wants to sink his teeth into.

What Caines withholds or reveals in these pictures, what is implicit or explicit, is less a

guessing game of meaning, and more an attempt to describe a kind of atheistic animism of the

psyche - a place populated by figures who's symbology is as fluid as a mood or an appetite.

This fluidity is built into the nature of the images: the fragility, transformation

and regeneration of the body; the symbiotic relationship between animal and

human; the indeterminacy of the space these figures inhabit. The soldier, the

sea captain,and the cowboy are all infantile icons that the artist longs for (and when he says

'infantile' he means it in the best sense of the word sensual, perverse,

powerful, loved), and he wants to touch and caress them through the bird or the

hairy arm, his surrogates. Through the touch of his brush, he hopes to serve also

as proxy for our caress, as if side by side we can share our perversities with

permission and with pleasure.