A Catch Away - Eva Bouzard-Hui, c. 1998

Eva Bouzard-Hui constructs A Catch Away as an airy vertical field in which human, animal, botanical, and skeletal forms occupy different levels of visibility. The composition does not establish a coherent landscape through conventional perspective. Instead, pale green and pink passages, isolated vertical strokes, dotted trails, and faint linear currents create the impression of water, reeds, air, or memory without firmly distinguishing among them.

At the middle left, the principal human figure appears suspended in motion. Its narrow body tilts diagonally while one arm extends toward the right, giving the pose the instability of someone reaching beyond a secure foothold. The figure’s elongated limbs and diamond-patterned garment lend it a theatrical quality. It resembles a dancer, harlequin, messenger, or fairy-tale traveler rather than an ordinary person inhabiting an observable environment.

This stylization introduces Bouzard-Hui’s characteristic mixture of seriousness and visual play. The figure appears whimsical, with a crown- or flower-like shape around the head and small dots decorating the body. Yet its posture is strained. One foot reaches downward while the torso pulls in the opposite direction, suggesting that pursuit requires both effort and risk.

A thin fishing line appears to extend from the figure toward the large fish at upper right. Bouzard-Hui rarely allows such lines to remain exclusively descriptive. They frequently serve simultaneously as narrative connections and emotional pathways. Here, the line makes the relationship between figure and fish visible without clarifying whether the gesture is one of capture, touch, rescue, or recognition.

The large fish occupies the upper-right quadrant with an almost monumental scale. Its body is softly washed in brown, gray, and pale green, while its fin is articulated through a repeated pattern of small brown marks. The creature appears to swim or hover above the lower scene, but Bouzard-Hui complicates its identity by inserting a human face into its side.

This embedded face is the work’s most psychologically charged element. It looks outward from within the fish rather than replacing the fish’s own head. The creature therefore contains two identities: the visible animal and the human presence carried inside it. The image may suggest a person disguised by instinct, emotion, or circumstance, or a memory transported within an animal form.

Bouzard-Hui’s human-animal hybrids belong to a larger practice in which categories remain deliberately unstable. Elsewhere, figures acquire birdlike faces, feathers, flower growths, shield-shaped bodies, or paper-doll extensions. These transformations allow inner states to become visible without relying upon realistic portraiture. The human face inside the fish makes emotional identity something concealed within another body.

The fish may also act as an object of desire. In everyday language, a desirable romantic partner can be described as “a catch,” while to catch something means to secure what was moving beyond one’s control. The title A Catch Away leaves the syntax unresolved. It can suggest being one successful catch away from fulfillment, but also a catch that remains perpetually at a distance.

The human face complicates any simple division between pursuer and prey. To catch the fish would also mean catching the person within it. Bouzard-Hui turns pursuit into a relational problem: what appears to be an object may contain a consciousness, and possession may become a form of confinement.

Additional fishlike forms move through the upper field. A pale pink and violet shape sweeps diagonally near the top, while smaller aquatic suggestions appear among the vertical green strokes. These diffuse forms seem less fixed than the large human-faced fish. They behave like fleeting sightings or thoughts, glimpsed briefly before dissolving into the surrounding paper.

This strategy recalls Bouzard-Hui’s treatment of birds in works such as Destination Pin Point, where creatures exist at different levels of clarity and represent multiple possible routes. Birds recur throughout her practice as signs of freedom, migration, vulnerability, and communication. In A Catch Away, fish assume a related role, but their movement belongs to water rather than air. They travel through a medium in which human beings cannot naturally follow without assistance.

That environmental difference gives the pursuit another layer of impossibility. The figure reaches from one kind of existence toward a creature adapted to another. The fish can move through depths unavailable to the human body, just as emotional or creative objects may remain visible without becoming fully accessible.

Flowers appear near the middle and lower sections of the work. Small pink blossoms hover among the vertical strokes above, while a more substantial cluster of rose-like blooms rests near the lower center. Bouzard-Hui’s flowers repeatedly carry meanings of love, renewal, beauty, vulnerability, and sacrifice. They are rarely simply decorative.

Here, the roses are positioned close to a dead fish. This proximity joins floral beauty with bodily remains. The flowers may memorialize what has died, grow from decay, or act as offerings placed upon the caught creature. Their presence introduces tenderness into an otherwise ambiguous scene of pursuit.

The large dead fish below is one of the composition’s clearest images. Its head, central spine, and crossed-out eyes are described through fine brown lines, while its body lies within a pale, waterlike field. The corpse reveals the potential consequence of catching: the living animal becomes an object, meal, specimen, or remnant.

This lower form acts as a warning beneath the human-faced fish above. What remains elusive retains life and mystery; what has been successfully obtained may be stripped to its structure. Bouzard-Hui does not necessarily condemn the desire to catch, but she recognizes that possession changes the status of the desired thing.

The pairing of fish and flowers therefore resembles the dual floral states in Flower Beyond Your Grasp. In that work, one figure reaches toward an elusive flower-like palette while another appears to hold a blossom that has already died. Bouzard-Hui again contrasts the vitality of what remains out of reach with the fragility of what has been secured.

A small gridded square appears toward the lower left. Its red crosshatching resembles a net, woven patch, window, or marked coordinate. Within the context of fishing, it may subtly evoke the apparatus of capture. Yet because it remains isolated and partly abstract, it can also suggest a small zone of order imposed upon the fluid environment.

The composition repeatedly contrasts linear systems with organic movement. Vertical green forms resemble reeds, tree trunks, or barriers, while dotted lines travel alongside them. The fish and flowers move through or around these structures without fully belonging to them.

Bouzard-Hui’s use of largely untouched paper is crucial. The extensive blank areas prevent the work from feeling crowded despite its many motifs. They create emotional and spatial distances among the figure, fish, flowers, and skeleton. Everything appears connected by implication, but nothing is firmly enclosed within a single narrative.

This open construction has affinities with automatic and Surrealist drawing, in which images emerge through association and metamorphosis rather than advance planning. Bouzard-Hui’s forms do not illustrate a story in sequence. They behave more like thoughts gathering around the idea of pursuit: the seeker, the desired object, the beauty encountered along the way, and the mortality hidden within success.

The title also preserves a playful tone. A Catch Away sounds almost like a conversational phrase or incomplete promise. It may imply that fulfillment is near—only one catch remains—but it can also indicate perpetual postponement. The desired thing is always one action farther away.

Within Bouzard-Hui’s larger body of work, the painting belongs to her sustained inquiry into movement obstructed or complicated by emotional need. In Caught, a bird’s natural capacity for flight is contradicted by trap-like lines. In Destination Pin Point, numerous birds embody competing paths while one is brought into the hand. In Flower Beyond Your Grasp, an elongated body strains toward what cannot be held. A Catch Away combines these concerns through aquatic imagery.

The human-faced fish is therefore not merely an eccentric invention. It becomes a symbol of the unreachable other—the person, memory, artistic idea, or emotional resolution that can be glimpsed but not safely possessed. The reaching figure gives the pursuit bodily urgency, while the skeleton below reminds us that capture has consequences.

A Catch Away presents desire as a tension between connection and control. The figure reaches because distance is painful, but the flowers, swimming creatures, and skeletal remains suggest that living things retain their vitality through movement and change. Bouzard-Hui leaves the viewer suspended before the catch, at the moment when hope, danger, beauty, and loss remain inseparable.