Howard Kanovitz essays about the artist

In the summer of 1965 I painted Second Avenue Still Life in tones of gray--a mess of art materials on a table in front of a window. The view, however, was set in place by a jet-black grid of windowpane dividers. This geometry presented an interesting format for observing the scene, a row of tenement buildings across Second Avenue. Later that year, when I was to paint New Yorkers I and II, I used this window view as a counterpoint to a group of friends circled around the poet, Frank O'Hara. It was not until 1968, when I began to isolate figures and objects as sculptural cut outs, that I introduced the window as a theme.

The Studio Window 1968, painted. on a shaped stretched canvas, was the first work in which I arrived at the illusion of a 3D object. It then seemed to me inevitable that I should move from window to wall, from wall to door. That year I painted The Painting Wall and Water Bucket Stool 1968, finding in these works a new hybrid which excited me because the depiction of the object and the object itself appeared as one.

In 1970 I exhibited in Germany for the first time at Galerie Joellenbeck, Koeln. My principle theme was the window and door as a sculptural cutout. Works such as Cloud Window 1970, Open Studio Window 1969 and 42 Britainnia Walk 1969 were the center pieces of this exhibition.

I used elements of trompe l'oeil in 1971 in the painting Projected Street Scene. In it, I depicted a slide projection on a wall in a darkened room, and six photographs pinned to the wall. Composition and One By Threes of the same year, explored other facets of illusion and the image/object relationship. These three paintings were exhibited in Dokumenta 4.

In the London paintings of 1972-1973, the seemingly real and imagined share the same spotlight. Chair Shadow 1973 is a piece of wall in which a broken window dissolves along it's edges. Below, a projection of a burning red sky is interrupted by the cool interior shadow of a chair. This shadow play, useful in its willingness to simplify, still identified the object. It also hinted at a source of light, which in many instances was artificial as that of a slide projector. Alongside this kind of illumination, a "natural" light was to be felt in the landscape of Projected Man 1977.

Light, then, became a principle player in Moonlit Wall 1984 and Grand Piano (For the Dance) 1987. There is an urge in these paintings to become objects, to partake of real space, but they are reluctant to fully enter. It is left to the painted wood and polymer constructions, Gardiner's Bay 1987, River Edge 1989 and Night Harbor 1989 to express relief in the third dimension.

by Howard Kanovitz