For more than twenty years Michael Bastow has been painting the same subject, in the same format, over and over again. Over that time his tall, narrow, larger than life paintings of women have grown into a whole history of womanhood as seen from Bastow’s unique perspective. Young women, old women, pregnant women, Chinese women, Indian women, tattooed women, all of them more or less naked, yet almost always surrounded by colour, including the regular inclusion of gold leaf.

So what is it about this gallery of women that Bastow has spent so many years working on? In 2008 the French anthropologist and art critic Marc Augé wrote of Bastow’s ‘Seven Ages’ paintings:

I have always been sensitive in Michael Bastow’s work to the strange beauty of the women he ‘lays’ on paper or canvas – the ambiguity of the French verb ‘appliquer’ capturing both the laying down of paint and the application of the painter’s attention and fascination to the subject being painted.
     Bastow’s technique of maintaining a constant format while capturing variety pushed his art of contrasts and ambiguity to the extreme in this ongoing series of ‘ephemeral frescoes’ installed in the Saint Alexis chapel in Malaucène and those awaiting installation, still hanging on the wall of his studio. They are particularly remarkable for at least two reasons.
     At the same time as he intends to dedicate his work to the seven ages of woman, Bastow reveals himself more sensitive than ever before to everything in the female body that evokes plenitude, maternity and the nurturing function – heavy breasts, curves, the rounded bellies of pregnant women. And he has also undertaken to represent older bodies, dried out by aging – this is a true display of the beauty of women at every stage of life.
     And the setting is perfect. The chapel, which one enters silently, offers a spectacle that is certainly surprising at first, but one where you quickly realise has something sacred about it, despite or maybe because of the profusion of nudity. Sacred, what does that mean? Something separate, say etymologists and ethnologists. All figurative painting is sacred in this sense, since it returns to the things from which it initially distanced itself. But here the sacredness of the installation is doubly powerful, partly as a result of the abandoned chapel, no longer officially consecrated, and partly due to the female bodies of all ages which ‘make sacred’ sensuality, fertility, procreation, birth, old age and death.
     We sometimes wonder if we have the right to find beautiful objects considered sacred by others. In the case of the Malaucène women the question is reversed: they are very obviously beautiful to our eyes, but can we not recognise in them the equivalent of a form of sacredness? If Bastow’s art allows us to go beyond conventional formulations and conceptual oppositions, it is because in his tenacious and evolving way he never ceases to explore the deep truths of beings and bodies.