Company Gallery is pleased to present The Sword, the Horse, and the Silence, an exhibition of new work by Raúl de Nieves that reimagines the enduring fable of Saint George and the Dragon as a meditation on belief, violence, and transformation. Bringing together paintings, works on paper, beaded sculptures, and stained-glass windows, the exhibition revisits an image that has recurred throughout the artist’s practice since 2003.
The series began with an embroidered depiction of Saint George and the Dragon gifted to de Nieves, rekindling his longstanding engagement with the fable. While living in San Francisco in the early 2000s, he became obsessed with the image, eventually committing himself to painting fifty versions of the scene. Through repetition, the image became a mantra and a vehicle for personal evolution. Saint George, the dragon, and the horse form a constellation in which the distinctions between hero and villain, victim and aggressor, defeat and victory begin to unravel. Identifying with all three figures, de Nieves questions how power and virtue are constructed.
Throughout the exhibition, representation gives way to abstraction. Familiar figures are obscured and reconstituted, sometimes reduced to a few lines or words. A beaded carousel horse shifts between ornament and sculptural presence, while the fragmented dragon extends through the gallery as an unresolved force. Meaning emerges not as something fixed, but as a construction continually assembled and interrupted through looking.
The image of Saint George also serves as an amulet, bearing the residue of a belief system de Nieves has both inherited and resisted. Although he rejected the Catholicism of his upbringing, its visual language remains central to his practice. Ornament is never merely decorative; beauty carries the weight of the histories and contradictions embedded within it.
The Sword, the Horse, and the Silence does not resolve the fable that has haunted de Nieves for more than two decades; instead, it sets the story in motion once again. The saint recedes, the dragon shatters, and the horse begins to acquire a life of its own. What remains is not a final victory but an opening: a silence in which meanings loosen, familiar figures become strange, and the image passes through its own fragments into uncertain new forms.
Company