Howard Kanovitz essays about the artist

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constructions of the past five years restricted their range of subject matter to domestic and studio interiors and appurtenances, divested of the human presence. He replaced a busy public pageant with a world of mute, inanimate objects over which a cataleptic calm reigned. He also sharpened the confrontations of invention and simulation by further investigation of trompe-l'oeil techniques, extending pictorial illusion into literal shape and palpable physical fact. A staircase in fleeing perspective, stacked-up canvases, a vacant painting wall, the ubiquitous windows (always a favorite motif), shaped canvas simulating radiators, furniture, and other commonplace objects of the home or studio were reverently documented and transformed into an autonomous architecture. Then in London Kanovitz removed himself from the monastic studio environment, with such feats and feasts for the eye as his stunning, monumental cover girl and movie star, Mia Farrow, in Journal and the large-scale floral piece Roses. Of this intriguing technicolor world of the media, where everything looms larger and better than life, Daniel Boors- tin has aptly written, "fantasy is more real than reality, the image has more dignity than its original.

Journal

We hardly dare face our bewilderment, because our ambiguous experience is so pleasantly iridescent, and the solace of belief in contrived reality is so thoroughly real." Technically, Kanovitz's paintings have long seemed a triumph of virtuosity and skill, yet his accomplishment would not long sustain our interest, lacking a more meaningful content. There is more at stake than cunning execution or exquisitely turned illusions. Something of the ubiquitous American Experience of urban loneliness haunts many of these paintings, the sure knowledge that even the most stubborn faith in visual facts and the hard-sell world of our consumer's paradise does not provide sufficient human sustenance or consolation. In past work, Kanovitz faithfully

Hotel Quai Voltaire

captured all the meretricious charm of the media, but his vision was always shadowed at the edges by a certain sense of the hollowness of media visual claims and false optimism. There have also been constant, if coded, references to art history and to the artistic process, reaffirming the artist's inescapable role as observer and visual poet, it not commentator. The more mysterious confrontations of fact and fiction, including the artist's own public situation, unlocked fresh meanings in the wasteland of American pop culture for him, and linked his work to more traditional concepts of individual creativity and to the deeper life of our culture. Now, in his current New York one-man show at the Stefanotty Gallery, Kanovitz's work discloses beguiling new optical ambiguities and humanist implications, despite, one's first impression of a hard, spare, and pristine clarity. He has abandoned the declamatory public stance of his rather simplistic, glossy, color-supplement and mural-scale imagery of the London years in Journal in favor of small-scale scenes, intimacy, and oblique insinuation. One is invited to be privy to his visual secrets as a close and privileged, unobserved observer in the studio and in his personal life. The paintings themselves are smaller, more meditative, and of a more private character. They even convey a certain indefinable poignancy, as if the unequivocal visual values of the photographic image, which continues to be their source, were not entirely reassuring in a human sense. Visual meanings are polyvalent, both obvious and subtle, objective and subjective, confirming the external world in its familiar guise and subverting it. This was also true in the past, but subtler shades of perceptual and phenomenal meanings have now intruded with an added tonal richness and design complexity and, incidentally, with a superlative new technical assurance in execution. I find myself responding with excitement to the rather novel interest in vantage point in some of these muted dramas of the banal