Chthonios Monumental I (2020)

The initial manifestation of Dylan Lewis’s Chthonios – a striking image of a maelstrom of forms – emerged following a six-year period of intense self-discovery. Perfectly encompassing the themes of self-actualisation, struggles within human relationships, and striving for liberation from harmful internalised indoctrination, the work concretises the turbulence of human emotions.

During lockdown in 2019, Lewis set to work on producing a monumental incarnation of an earlier work, allowing it to evolve intuitively and organically rather than through exact reproduction. The result is a visceral large-scale sculptural work which recalls Rodin’s magnum opus The Gates of Hell and William Blake’s The Lovers’ Whirlwind. Both of these saw the artists drawing on the evocative imagery of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, but vehemently eschewing any moralising allegory in favour of celebrating the full spectrum of the human experience in all its complexity. With Chthonios, Lewis extends this striking, chaotic imagery to reflect on the agony and ecstasy of trying to connect with the ‘other’ – both other human beings and with the self.

Chthonios marks a significant culmination in the narratives that have underpinned Lewis’s work from the very beginning: the searching for wholeness and self-actualisation against forced familial, cultural, and social conformity. Lewis captures the sense of the sublime that comes from standing on a precipice and witnessing the tumult. It is a view from the eye of a storm, a reckoning with the prospect of being pummelled by a chaotic maelstrom of human emotions and being unsure of whether it will utterly destroy or bring about the intense desire for wholeness.

The sculpture takes the form of large circular arrangement enclosed within a square. This contrasting of the two shapes recurs throughout a diverse array of mandala traditions in a number of world religions, throughout alchemical symbolism, and even in Jungian analytical psychology. Common throughout these various incarnations is the idea of a circle within a square as a symbol of wholeness or totality, contrasting boundlessness with lucidity. This is exactly what Chthonios represents for Dylan Lewis.

_{Adapted from an original text by Tim Leibbrandt}

S-H 83 (3) Chthonios I Monumental I is part of Masterpiece Online 2021

Dylan Lewis discusses his Chthonios miniature bronzes as part of the Winter 2020 exhibition.

Watch below...

Dylan Lewis's second solo exhibition, Chthonios, is subject of a feature by Ishani Chetty on House and Leisure. Chetty voted the exhibition as a 'must visit' within Cape Town. 

Click here to access the story. 

Everard Read London artist, Dylan Lewis, is the subject of an interview with Dr. Johan Thom on Art Times.

To read the full article follow here.

Lewis' work is on show during Everard Read London's SUMMER group show. For more information or to request a portfolio please follow here.

Art Angels Africa brought their annual charity auction to London for the first time this month, auctioning works by top South African artists. Several Everard Read artists donated works for the auction, including Beezy Bailey, Deborah Bell, Phillemon Hlungwani, Angus Taylor, Rina Stutzer, Lionel Smit, Colbert Mashile, Dylan Lewis and Nic Bladen, along with Sam Nhlengethwa and Marco Cianfanelli. 

Dylan Lewis's oversized wildlife sculptures reflect the vastness of South African Landscapes by Jonathan Foyle. Published in the Finincial Times on 15 October 2016.

"South African sculptor Dylan Lewis is forging the evolution of bronze. He was raised in a landscape of red soils rich in copper. His country offers some of the earliest evidence of man, such as the Cradle of Humankind, a Unesco world heritage site near Johannesburg. Here, hunters lived in caves, some of which contain bulbous, tumbling limestone stalactites — natural sculptures directly expressive of primeval forces, wrought through base material."

Dylan Lewis, of the occasion of his exhibition Untamed at Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens, is the subject of a video