The current theme ‘Ecstasy and Death’ is a figurative series that explores the thin line between existence and non existence, between being alive and not being alive.
It has developed from my fascination with the binary sequences, where the choice is 1 or 0..
and the rich relationship between these two digits. 0 is so absolute, and 1 seems to take it’s meaning only in relation to 0.  Something or nothing. Life or death. It’s a play of association, which, during the process of writing thousands of 1’s and 0’s, has time to sink in, and allow me to reflect.

I’ve been struck in the past by the resemblance of the face in ecstasy or orgasm to that of the dying or dead.. in both the body seems to be vacant.. left behind, gone beyond. In sneezing and yawning there is also a comparison.  Through abstracting in the medium of paint from these source materials, I hope to explore the ambiguity of these states of being.


 Decimal Poetry: Notes on Garth Bowden     
  One of the paradoxes of contemporary society is that while on the one hand we are privileged with access to an unparalleled abundance of communicative channels  - many now feel adrift and spurned if not granted a daily inundation of texts, emails, tweets and ‘Facebookings’ – on the other hand the general content of our communicative exchanges has never seemed more impoverished, more bereft of both meaning and style.  To misappropriate a line of John Cage’s, it often seems “we have nothing to say and we are saying it”  and that we are approaching  the condition diagnosed by Marshall MacLuhan as far back as the 60’s whereby “the medium is the message” ie. it hardly matters what is said as long as the apparently-empowering sensation of networking interface is achieved.
   The work of Garth Bowden is built upon such paradoxes – one could say his art follows Blake’s dictum “Without contraries is no progression”. His ongoing fascination with binary sequences is part of a concern to avoid simplistic, unitary meanings and instead set up dialogues and interplays across his work as a whole. In this way, the monochromatic grids of 1s and 0s that make up his Binary paintings work on numerous levels, each offsetting the other. At first glance, these pieces might seem austere abstracts with an almost shimmering surface-effect. Then, on closer inspection, we notice the meticulously-arranged rows of tiny digits and wonder what they might add up to, perhaps puzzled by the inclusion of mathematical figures in a ‘fine art’ context. We then remember how binary codes are the information-bearing language of computer processors and so covertly underpin much of our society (from the international banking system to our very identities): is there a social critique of the tendency to reduce individuals to mere data going on here? The initial reference seems to be to The Matrix, with its key-image of reality being replaced by a network of numerals in constant flux, but one could also see an ironic resemblance to the Rosetta Stone, that  Ancient Egyptian monolith inscribed with rows of hieroglyphs. Another paradox: ancient and modern languages collide and clash: is either more cryptic or unintelligible than the other?
   This is one example of what Garth has often said of his work: that fundamentally it is “an exploration of language”. The Russian critic Victor Schlovsky identified the key effects of literary text as being both a defamiliarisation and a deceleration of language. In the same way, Garth’s  depiction of numerals and fragments of found text recontextualises them as static artefactsand makes us reflect anew on the barrage of signs that surrounds us. Language is never the naturalised, transparent medium it seems in our information-saturated world but is in fact always heavy with social and cultural meanings, to the extent that it could be said to shape our perceptions and ideologies in largely unconscious ways.
   In Garth’s most recent paintings, the Death and Ecstasy sequence, he seems to be confronting the ultimate binary-opposition: life and death. One is reminded of Baudelaire’s fateful dualism: Tout enfant, j'ai senti dans mon cœur deux sentiments contradictoires : l'horreur de la vie et l'extase de la vie. In these powerful, lyrical works Garth seems to be moving beyond the pared-down vision of the Binary Sequence to a deeper conception of what art can still achieve : against the horror of a world where human identity is codified into mere commodity and where culture and language have degenerated into meaninglessness, a life-affirming esctasy (through sexuality, personal faith, belief in the quality of experience and ideas) can still at times be grasped.
                                                                                                                     Oliver Dixon   2010
Oliver Dixon is a writer and lecturer based in London whose poems and reviews have appeared in PN Review, The Wolf, Frogmore Papers and Nth Position