Howard Kanovitz essays about the artist

Howard Kanovitz is today perhaps the most poetic of the group of New Realists who began to forge novel expressive truths from the photographic image in the sixties. He has managed to reconstitute visual commonplaces so that their banality guarantees an unsuspected mystery and aura of romance. . Like the enigmas of Margitte, Kanovitz's imagery reveals a mercurial reversibility which subverts the scenario of our familiar world. Instead of simple facts and schema, we find equations of ambiguity; the meticulous airbrush technique and his exactness of vision produce an atmosphere of doubt rather than certitude, and pose questions of meaning which challenge the nature of artistic experience. Like the first discoverers of trompe l'oeil and especially the Flemish Renaissance masters, Kanovitz makes us acutely aware of artistic process and the miracle of vision, as well as material reality. The more crystalline his illusions, the less assurance they seem to provide. However, Kanovitz magically asserts through his paintings many of the unresolvable ambiguities of vision; nothing is less sure or more sure than a given set of visual facts, especially when mediated by photographic techniques and the hard, bright simulations of illustrated commercial journalism. By way of example, his Carpenter's Sky (1973) conjugated various stages of an image from simulated to its shadow in a manner reminiscent of Duchamp's prophetic experiment in the illusionist play of Tu m'.

To complicate the visual synthesis, Kanovitz includes the contemporary technology of slide projection in his image repertory. His cloudscapes raise questions, linked to Magritte, of distinctions between interior and external worlds, between visual actualities and their mirrored doubles. In keeping with the "cool" rationale of his period, however, there is no explicit reference to Surrealist fantasy. Problems in perception and an obsessive interest in new visual technology provide a sufficient basis for his complex pictorial content. While fantasy may be suppressed, there is an evident tension between perception and intellect, and the visual quandaries do

Carpenter's Sky

have a psychological dimension, an element or undertone difficult to define, of critical commentary despite the trancelike stillness and objectivity. Kanovitz began to work in his genre of controlled, stylized realism, based on the photograph, more than a decade ago, and showed his first sizable body of work in memorable exhibition at the Jewish museum in 1966. In an interview, he told the poet William Berkson that he envisioned his role as that of a film director, casting and arranging tableaux of arrested action. But, when the camera's fixities threatened to congeal scene and action into stereotype, some wayward painting energy was released, transforming dull fact into vital pictorial fictions, abstract patterns of shape and form, or riveting, obsessive visual detail. Berkson characterized the artist's work in this way: "Kanovitz's paintings….recall one of William Carlos William's quips: 'You can do lots if you know what's around you.' What Kanovitz works with in the these paintings is not so far removed from the material Williams brought into poetry-fragments of a public mythology which the fresh-eyed observer may find scattered around…and of which he may make some sensible use." In the late sixties Kanovitz abandoned the public mythology of photojournalism, leaving behind the alternatively anonymous or celebrated figures and visage taken from the communications media. Instead he began to examine the visual word from a more personal perspective, in the framework of the private "myth" of his own experience as an artist. This better provided him entrance for a characteristic poetic note, which mixed bland fact with a touch of romantic suggestion reminiscent of the strain of a darkling romantic realism imbedded in American tradition from Eakins to Hopper. The paintings and