Dominique Knowles's work occupies the spectral plane between dreams and waking life. His debut at Greene Naftali expands the corpus of roiling landscapes for which he is known, laced with figurative elements in what he calls “a build-up of ritual, a sediment of memories.” The Solemn and Dignified Burial Befitting My Beloved for All Seasons circles his recurring themes: forms of devotion, alchemy, loss, and a heightened attunement to animal being.

The new works on view mourn the artist’s late horse and lifelong companion. A painter, poet, and accomplished equestrian, Knowles grew up around the stables, and a reverence for the bonds that can form between species animates his work. Each expanse of stretched linen teems with his signature brushwork, both ethereal and grounded—whorls of thinned paint in an earthen palette of ochre, umber, moss, and sandstone red. Horses appear in schematic outline or partial silhouette; horizon lines pulse like waves on the sea; a human-like figure either exits or immolates in a wall of flames. The pull of death in arcadia underlies what one critic calls Knowles’s “necropastoral,” haunting a genre typically concerned with nature’s cultivation and mastery.