The High Priest: from Road to Narragonia Series: Viewing Room

"Chris Gollon is a masterful inventor of images.  The strange freaks who people his paintings are like no other beings:  they force themselves on our consciousness and dwell there, refusing to go away.  Every one of his characters is in a more or less desperate situation, without doubt of their own making, yet we are drawn into their world, willy nilly.  His cast includes drunks and clowns, misfits and down-and-outs, people whom society has rejected, but Gollon transmutes these unsavoury people into heroic figures through his deep sympathy with the human predicament, however absurd.  The paintings are both expressive and expressionist, late twentieth century manifestations of the great Northern European tradition of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Hieronymus Bosch, Max Beckmann and George Grosz, for all of whom the folly and wickedness of man is the mainspring of their art.

Gollon’s great series Road to Narragonia was inspired by Bosch’s painting The Ship of Fools (Louvre) which in turn was motivated by the long allegorical poem by the late fifteenth scholar and satirical writer Sebastian Brant which tells of a ship-load of fools who set sail for the Fools’ Paradise, Narragonia.  Brant’s poem is comment on contemporary folly and many kinds of vice – drunkenness, lechery and corruption.  Gollon’s series proves that human nature does not change, and people are as misguided, foolish and corrupt as their fifteenth century counterparts.   His understanding of Brandt’s poem and Bosch’s painting was consolidated by the fact that he was coincidentally listening to an old album by Bob Dylan called ‘Highway 61 Revisited’  and was struck by the song ‘Desolation Row’ in which the singer seemed to be travelling along with the song.  Thus, Gollon’s series became the equivalent of a road movie.

The strange disproportion in the size of the figures contributes to the hallucinatory effect of Gollon’s paintings.  The figures are realistically presented, yet they are so gruesome that they deny their reality.  None is more so than The High Priest, a thuggish-looking villain who is a self-appointed High Priest, but indeed a high priest of what?  His hands are raised as if in prayer, but more likely they are opened to catch something more elusive, luck perhaps, since his own has surely run out.  He wears tinted glasses to shade his shifty eyes, and he turns his head to look at us guiltily, showing his furrowed bull neck and prominent Adam’s apple.  The disproportion extends to a figure at the rear who is attempting to uproot the nails holding the stage together, indicating that he at least has given up any hope in the efficacy of prayer.  The girl or small woman stretches her arms up, not out of conviction, but because she has been told that it is the right thing to do.  Indeed, her featureless face proclaims that she does not know why she is doing it.  Similarly, the little man wears on his head an absurd fusion of a bottle and a rolling pin for reasons which are unknown to him and unknowable to us.  Gollon asserts that the self-styled High Priest  “is looking for a miracle”.  Magic Realism is only one of the ways to designate this transmigration between the miraculous and the surreal."