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Howard Kanovitz Death in Treme (mixed media environment, 1970) |
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From July 6th until August 29th 2009, EL SOURDOG HEX e.V. will be presenting Howard Kanovitz´s (b. 1929 Fall River, Massachusetts, USA) mixed-media environment Death in treme, 1970. In the 1940s, Howard Kanovitz studied painting at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence. The work he produced in the 1950s can be categorized as abstract expressionism. The following decade, Kanovitz began to focus on creating realistic paintings, pastels and drawings. Yet it would be too narrow to call this work 'realism.' Howard Kanovitz´s paintings do not show reality as such, but rather express doubt in what normally is taken for reality. They focus on a world of ordinary things - things we take for granted - and make us marvel at the world around us. "Everything is as it is and yet never as it seems." (Howard Kanovitz) Comparing the works of surrealist painter René Magritte and Howard Kanovitz, we begin to understand that Howard Kanovitz´s works do not stringently adhere to the rules of reality. Still reality, as Kanovitz sees it, is not determined by the actual subject matter depicted in his work, but rather by the technical capabilities and limitations of the medium in which it is originally captured, which in his case is often photography. In contrast, René Magritte turns to familiar conventions of the human imagination. Yet instead of using them to reinforce the way we imagine and perceive our world, he manipulates them, recontextualizes them and runs with them. His paintings are a language that re-explains the world, a language of familiar letters and words that show us the physical world anew. That is not to say that Kanovitz´s realistic pieces are about depicting objects exactly as they are arranged or lighted in the reference photographs he uses. The actual content of his pieces seems incidental at best, mere contraband attesting to the fact that the subject of the painting is a photograph. And he communicates this with a rare finesse for color harmony and keenly articulated color movement. Indeed, Howard Kanovitz has been one of the most significant names in photorealism since 1963. Anyone as concerned about the technical capabilities of creating images and illusionism as Kanovitz is has to hold perception in the highest esteem. It is this esteem for surface appearances that infuses his understanding of uncompromising realism with a poetry all its own. In 1974, the German newspaper Die Zeit published Klaus Reinke´s response to the Kanovitz exhibition at the Lehmbruck Museum: "What sets his paintings apart is that the reality depicted in them is not necessarily the reality they depict." "All objects are obscured through the camera´s eye." (Elias Canetti)
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