GOATS

You know a painting is good when it is not only seen, but heard. These goats by Pavlos Habidis are making noises! They're chewing and bleating. I can hear their bells ringing! Something has happened over the past year to the goats we find on these new canvases - they have become increasingly real, even more amusing and likable; their personalities are stronger than ever.

Prehistoric cave paintings of France and Southern India feature goats, and prove that these animals have fascinated  artists for millennia. Habidis has been painting goats for decades, but  some of his goats (especially in the smaller works) have crossed over a line recently – they have transformed from hirsine symbols to specific creatures. Goat aficionados can guess not only their Genus and species, but breed. The dichotomy between animal and human form (here we never find a specific person or portrait) is stronger than ever, so it comes as a surprise that they can relate to each other so harmoniously on the same canvas.

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Goats, as some of the first domesticated animals on earth, coexist peacefully with humans and are a fundamental part of our collective conscious. We've been together for nearly 10,000 years. One of the most poignant and memorable ancient Greek sculptures, the high Archaic, 6th century Moschophoros, has obviously inspired Habidis, and so his tender and intimate oil painting of a youth carrying a goat on his shoulders manages to be both familiar - especially to Greeks – but also original.

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There is something magical, almost unsettling about the horizontal pupils in the eyes of goats, and because their irises are pale, we see them better than we do in cattle or deer. Some of these works capture that "otherness" of their eyes perfectly. That's why I love all of these paintings, from the goat being carried over a shoulder to the small painting of the goat bleating, with its head and upper lip lifted. So perfectly caprine, so perfectly Habidis!

Clark Lawrence

Art Historian

Curator of Reading Retreat in Rural Italy