"...‘Art’, Adorno writes, ‘is exactly what emerges from the empirical and refers to what art itself is not.’ In Finnegan’s Teeth it is exactly this exteriority that creates an inaccessible and mysterious interiority; it is the absence of meaning, which reclaims the presence of any possible meaning. Cowan traverses photography because the photograph does not explain what it gives to sight: it excludes interpretation of the real. The only knowledge it offers, as Roland Barthes writes in Camera Lucida, is what we acquire ‘in the first glance’. It is exactly this moment that inaugurates estrangement. As the photograph does not allow interpretation, its image legitimates doubt, because the distance from the framed object allows only evocation through remembrance and resemblance. Cowan extends this process and extracts fragments from the photographs – odd angles, blown up details, blurred shots. There is no doubt that Cowan’s photographic work represents the discovery of a conceptual space, where the visible does not emerge from direct contact with the real. This space is anamorphic. The artist introduces the torsion typical of anamorphosis in the history of painting by strictly using the tools of photographic language. In anamorphosis the forms project themselves outside themselves and in so doing they change reality giving form to the illusion of another reality. In this way, signs of the real discover the third dimension by revealing its fantastic and absurd aspect..."

Stella Santacatterina

Portfolio Magazine: November 2010