Soldered brass, stone, 16 x 16 x 7, 2015.
Chetak is a portrait of a disguise. At Haldighati in 1576, Maharana Pratap’s horse was dressed as a baby elephant so that he could ride unharmed through the Mughal war elephants. McCourt builds the animal in two layers held together by straps and buckles. The legs, belly and flanks are bright brass horse. The head, the drape over the back and the tail are dark, patinated elephant, fastened on over it. The color division reads like a diagram of the ruse, and it gives the viewer what the enemy was denied: both animals in view at once.
The horse has no head of its own. The elephant’s head sits where the horse’s would, so the only face in the work belongs to the disguise. It is also the most committed part of the piece. The eye, the ear, the tusk and the ridged trunk are all precise, and the trunk is thrown up over an open mouth in the posture of a trumpeting elephant. Below it, the legs are slender, with fine fetlocks, and one foreleg is lifted in the high, arched step of a horse. The title names the horse, and the work shows him only as the animal he was pretending to be.
On the back, where the rider sits, is a polished sphere with a pierced, crown-like rim. Pratap is present as a crowned round form with no body beneath it, a head carried on top of the animal. The sphere is the same bright brass as the horse’s legs, and the dark drape lies between the two. The horse and the king are the same metal, and the elephant guise is a layer laid over the first and under the second.
The stepped base of dark green stone is the plinth of an equestrian monument, a form built to honor the rider. Here it carries the horse, and the rider survives only as his crown. Chetak died in the battle, and the work holds him mid-stride with the foreleg raised, at the moment of passing through the elephants. The monument preserves him in the form that concealed him, which is the only form in which his service was ever visible.
