The term ‘magic’ has been so radically diluted over the years it has lost whatever magic it once held. So too terms like sorcery, witchcraft and
spells. They have become the realm of Disney fantasia, sit-com entertainment and romance, their potent incarnations left like pollen in
the wind, causing the occasional sneeze. But Rowan E. Cassidy isn’t buying into the schmaltz. Magic, he insists, can still be found.
A part of Cassidy’s magic is in the strange way he evokes a sense of music. This is, of course, in his use of calligraphy which inevitably
allows a sense of poetry or at least the poetic. But under Cassidy’s hand, and when combined with his often dark and foreboding imagery, that
music can range from the lyrical, genteel and romantic, to the searing and discordant, more LA Punk than enchanting parlour music. Jack
Grayle, author of The Hekataeon, captures this dead-on when he discusses Cassidy’s “visceral physicality” as he applies his inks and
charcoals with a savage aggressiveness.
Cassidy is by no means a naïve artist. He studied at the at Australian National Art School followed by Communication Design at James
Cook University. He went on to design for numerous successful feature films in Los Angeles and elsewhere. Successful in all these fields he
inevitably rebelled, moving to Bali in Indonesia in order to concentrate on not only his painterly ambitions but to immerse himself in his
fascination with the visionary and the esoteric. Unlike many such artists, there was zero tolerance for the more hippy-trippy aspect of such
an ambition. When he veers into colour it is with a palette that borders on the severe melancholia of an Edvard Munch rather than 1960s
psychedelia. In that regard Cassidy is perhaps more of an intellectual artist than an expressionist. When he tackles William Blake it is by no
means with a wide-eyed celebration; Cassidy sees Blake in all the gory glory for which he is rightfully historicised.
Can there be such a thing as a Postmodern Mystic? It seems a strangely apt title for such an original artist. But using a graphic sensibility so
fine-tuned and applying it to elements of the cosmic enlightenment creates a strange alchemy of its own, one that drags ancient fears into
the new century, both evoking nightmares and calling for rational dreams.
Cassidy recently sent me an image. The stuff of nightmares: A black horse plummeting from the sky in what at first may seem like a ghastly
death plunge, its sleek torso heading for bloody decimation upon the rocks below. But so perfect is this evidently doomed creature that I
looked away, somehow convinced that this stallion would right itself mid-air to continue it potent existence.
– Ashley Crawford.
Dr. Ashley Crawford is the author of Dark Gnosis: Religious Imaging in
Millennialist America (Palgrave MacMillan, New York)
A Word on Rowan E Cassidy’s Exhibition: Darkness Visible
Written by Jack Grayle, Author of “The Hekataeon”
We recognise the visual artist as a craftsman who gives depth, breath, length, width, and character to what is otherwise dimensionless, invisible. Like a little god, the artist creates what was not there before. His works are a way in for the rest of us; they impose structure upon the inchoate so that we may see the invisible, touch the intangible, and know the unknowable. As such, the artist’s talent is rare, their skill holy, their function sacred.
And I can think of no artist who is as adept at this sacred function than Rowan E Cassidy.
In my opinion Rowan is the foremost metaphysical artist of his generation. His classical training gives his figures the sensual density of William Blake’s bodies so that they seem to live and breathe upon the canvas. His gift for perspective can expand or collapse the subject of his work; so much so, the viewer is almost startled by the truthfulness of the portrayal.
And yet this talent for verisimilitude is rivaled by his amazing gift for calligraphy. Here Rowan excels in what is virtually a lost art. The clarity of his eye, the integrity of his line, is worth the price of admission alone.
But Rowan’s technical talent for wordsmithing is overshadowed by the conceptual power of his compositions, in which the words do not simply describe the action of the piece; they assume the active role. They – literally – make the magic happen.
To be clear: Rowan’s works are not about magic; they are magic.
In the West, the term “magic” means sleight-of-hand tricks. But in the East, magic is still real. It can be defined as the ability to compel change through the agency of spirit allies. And this paradigm captures the heart of Rowan’s art.
In his showing, Rowan has illustrated a dozen magical texts dating from the third century CE. These are a collection of actual magical spells which were excavated in the nineteenth century from an African sorcerer’s tomb in ancient Thebes, in Roman Egypt. Scholars refer to them collectively as the Greco-Egyptian Magical Papyri, or PGM.
The PGM spells were originally written in Coptic with reed pens on long scrolls of papyrus. They were neither literature nor liturgy: they were a form of street-sorcery performed by Egyptian priests in their off hours for private hire. But because it was illegal to perform sorcery in the Roman Empire, they are clearly illegal workings, meant to be performed by outlaws for outlaws. The laws at the time dictated that the clients of sorcerers, if caught, should be crucified. The sorcerers themselves should be burned at the stake. The PGM spells, then, are outlaw magic which was only procured and performed at great personal risk. That we have them at all is astonishing. But what Rowan has done with them is more astonishing still.
Rowan has taken a carefully-curated array of PGM spells and breathed new life into them with his pen and brush. Each painting contains the text of a different spell rendered in fascinating calligraphy that swirls and twines like the plumes of ascending incense smoke. And each contains a sigilistic portrayal of the spirit that is being invoked.
Here, Rowan’s art achieves its transcendent apex. A spirit, after all, has no body; it is by definition formless. And yet by the craft of his pen and brush, we witness with awestruck wonder the apparition of IAO, PHTHA, TYPHON-SET, and the dread Son-of-Darkness-Soul-of-Darkness, BAXYXSYXYX. It is to Rowan’s credit that he does not simply draw literal human bodies for these spirits to occupy. Instead, he uses an intuitive method of artistic magic to create a sigil – a charged, personalized signifier – which both represents and literally embodies the essence of the daimon summoned by the spell.
Set against a dreamlike, monochromatic landscape, these sigils seem to float free of the canvas. Chimaera-like, they are both linear and intuitive; formal and chaotic; recognizable and mysterious. They are boldly immanent, and yet at the edges they bleed, melt, or dissolve like mist in the wind. Indeed, the starkness and strangeness of their design impresses itself upon the imagination of the viewer, and they remain visible in the mind’s eye long after viewing, like the afterimage of the sun.
In a word, they haunt.
That these ancient spells still have power to move the viewer to fear and wonder is not remarkable. What is remarkable is that they have been brought to life so viscerally on a canvas. After all, they were not meant to be seen; they were meant to be sung aloud. What Rowan has done with enormous skill is to visually depict not only the singing of a spell but also the effect of the singing upon the listener. His paintings triangulate sorcerer, client, and daimon so as to capture in a moment the very epiphany of the god.
It is truly a great accomplishment. Rowan – like all the great artists before him – has found a way to give form to the formless, and to the blood-dark spirits of ancient Thebes, a local habitation and a name.