Voici le soir charmant, ami du criminel;
II vient comme un complice, à pas de loup; le ciel
Se ferme lentement comme une grande alcôve,
Et l'homme impatient se change en bête fauve.
Charles Baudelaire, Le Crépuscule du Soir
Behold the charming evening, friend to the criminal;
It comes as an accomplice, stealthily; the sky
Closes over slowly like a great alcove
And the impatient man turns into a wild beast.
“Entre chien et loup” is a French expression which comes from the mediaeval latin infra horum vespertinam, inter canem et lupum and alludes to the momentary liminality between day and night, when a wolf can easily be mistaken for a dog.
It can also signify the instability of the world and mind - moments of transition, ambivalence, uncertainty. Across cultures, the threshold signals the boundary between the domesticated and the wild, the known and the unknown, and the psychological transformation that occurs when these worlds meet.
In Persian folklore, the wolf’s tail denotes the first light, the false dawn. Ingmar Bergman’s film The Hour of the Wolf describes the pre-dawn moment when nightmares intensify, fears peak, and the boundary between rationality and the irrational thins, yet this is also the time when new life and possibility emerge.
Just as dusk transforms and distorts the landscape, the liminal twilight state of the mind awakens the imagination.
Diane Howse approaches painting as a process of discovery. Working directly with oil paint and oil stick on linen, she lets colour, gesture, and material guide each work as layers are built, altered, and partially removed. Forms emerge only through this physical exchange, where vivid and muted tones meet in shifting relationships and marks range from broad sweeps to quick, incisive gestures. Remaining entirely abstract, the layered surfaces invite the viewer’s imagination, prompting fleeting associations that appear and dissolve within the movement of colour and texture. Rooted in a heightened attentiveness to visual experience, Howse’s paintings translate moments of perception into material form, instigating pareidolic visions in the eye of the observer.
Jonathan Schofield is interested in the transformation of experiences - to follow an idea of dandyism developed by Baudelaire - the ‘immutable ephemeral’, painting as luminous - painting as a way to hold time. The liminality of existence, poised between night and day, defies the certainty of assumptions; this ambiguity is ever-present in Schofield’s paintings. In The Birthdays, a homage to Gauguin, a figure offers a gift or a maybe sacrifice to another woman wearing a crown. The Huntress wears a dress beginning to transmogrify, taking on elements of the landscape, as she seems to be transforming too. In the series painted on reclaimed palettes, the Arttist uses the “circular thumb hole” as a visual synonym for the Moon, and then builds a scene around it. In Lycanthropy, a figure emerges from the gloam of a forest; the observer’s eyes, adjusting to the light, may wonder if a metamorphosis is in progress.
Together, Howse, Hewish, and Schofield invite viewers into the liminal space “entre chien et loup,” where perception shifts, imagination awakens, and the ordinary transforms into the extraordinary.
