“Interval”
Photographs by Bryan Dawe, at the Huw Davies Gallery, Photoaccess, Manuka, until August 23.
Reviewed by Helen Musa

IN this exhibition, comedian Bryan Dawe exhibits none of the satirical art for which he is known. Made possible only by the advent of digital photography, as he has said, the show of studio-based works is wildly painterly and very far away from the verbal. 
While Dawe sees surrealism as a major influence on his work, citing everybody from Marcel Duchamp to Bill Henson as influences, these large-format photographs are very identifiably his own work.
Based to some extent on a bright idea he had years ago when he saw patterns accidentally reflected on to his eight-year-old daughter’s white dress, they have nothing in common with the recently controversial Henson photographs. 
He has used obviously mature-aged models and a variety of means to abstract the works from day-to-day reality. His claim to have taken the female nude as a basis of his work is only evident in one sombre Degas-like photograph where a single breast is bared. But elsewhere the gallery is alive with colour and cloth, as his camera becomes the paintbrush.
Not at all surrealistic in its impact, the photographs seem more akin to Toulouse-Lautrec’s posters as a one-hatted model dances, clown-like at first then romantic through swirls of impressionistic fabric. There are other models and some works with no humans figure visible, but the movement continues.  Indeed, in the entire exhibition there is only one truly static portrait showing two dancers seated back to back, and that is probably the least successful work. Elsewhere, the photographs seem to breathe the demi-monde of Parisian cabaret – all life, all colour.