Polo works

By Sacha Craddock 
September 2015

Mark Evans’ powerful diptychs capture essence and force without fully representing the actuality of the pace and violence of the game of Polo.

The dynamic force of the collective will on the Polo field, and the individual ambition of the gladiatorial Polo player appears here almost en passant. 

The work, which is to be shown together to make a whole in Kuala Lumpur, functions as a reference to extremely fast progression across space, ground and time.

An intense projection, an extensive investigation of the space around and in between the action of the game of Polo is hand carved into the surface of leather by Evans’ knives and scalpel blades. 

His leather is worked into with meticulous skill. Somewhere between the painterly, the photographic and the engraved plate, the negative marks he makes which take away, are made positive as he etches, scratches, stretches, ripples, and breaks up the surface of the hide, managing to hold the sometimes glowing ripple of light against dark. The Conversion of St Paul by Caravaggio is a touch stone; action and anguish, emerges not just as facial expression but in the range of touch from fine and detailed marks, to general and all encompassing. 

With the ground at the front, it is a process of taking away in order to make an image. Here, the material itself lends, literally, to the subject. Think of Edward Ruscha using tea, coffee, wine, for the colour and fact of the work. The skin and surface of a horse; brittle, hard, shiny in the light projecting off and bouncing. The energy and effort is in the night, in a lonely and solitary arena, despite the presence of others. As the horses come in, the air is often weighty with warmth, beads of sweat, arc lights bearing down the relationship to photography transmits the arbitrary nature of moment, the space in between as well as the actual image itself. 

There is a strong relation to craft that is now left at the wayside. The literal relationship between photographic print and engraving, for instance, allows a sense of action so fast, so intense that the camera, or knife working the surface, has abandoned the direct notion of description in favour of a physical sense of the surface. The material carries a weight and significance which is there intrinsically. A direct relation to ground and surface merges the idea that this is purely raw material, a neutral base, with the fact that this is actually leather, seductive and potent.