THE ECHO OF OVID
BY CHARLES A. RILEY II, PhD. September 02, 2022

“I shall endeavor to find out how nature’s forces act upon one another, and in what manner the geographic environment exerts its influence on animals and plants. In short, I must find out about the harmony in nature.”

— Alexander von Humboldt

Untitled (Fish School) :: Oil/Linen :: 100 x 120 in. :: 2022

When Doug Argue stirs an oceanic vista, likening a school of fish to the world swirling outside his studio window, he taps a great art historical tradition: metamorphosis. Ovid’s epic opens with a creation myth and follows with its own theme and variations, irresistible tales of transformation from Daphne to Arachne and Europa. For Titian, Rubens, Michelangelo, Gerome, Bellini, Rodin, Dali and so many others, these have been thematic catnip. 

Untitled :: Oil/Canvas :: 52 x 72 in. :: 2021

Fish School 2 :: Scale :: Oil/Canvas :: 8 x 10 ft. :: 2021

Argue captures one brilliant, Kantian aspect of Ovid, the “on-and-on” nature of the sublime. The recursive aspect of his fish, like the birds of M.C. Escher, can suggest the perpetuum mobile of a Bach fugue and its illusion of infinity that comes from mirrored themes, just as inside the multitudes of fine brushstrokes in Argue’s paintings there is the potential to become lost. 

For Argue to collate his mesmerizing paintings of fish with the compositional strategy of theme and variations which has served not just composers but artists and poets so well, is brilliant. Think of the serial works of Monet or Warhol, or the poetry of Wallace Stevens, and you will grasp how change is revealed in stages just as Darwin and Humboldt tracked the evolution of biodiversity through multiplicity. Argue’s great achievement in this exhibition is not just the conceptual brilliance of this universal idea, but the technical bravura necessary to carry it off on canvas. Argue is a virtuoso, capable of building the illusion fish by fish that carries the argument to us.

We are caught in his net of painterly innovation.