Howard Kanovitz essays about the artist

"Photography has destroyed verisimilitude."
                             --Elias Canetti
I.

Howard Kanovitz paints pictures in which the everyday, the familiar, the self-evident, the banal once more become an occasion to view reality with amazement. I sit in a taxicab that has stopped by the side of the road and look out through the windshield. I see the asphalt roadway in twilight, and the headlights of oncoming cars. Directly in front of me, illuminated by the headlights of my taxi, a large road sign amid light poles with power lines strung between them, the words "Sugar Plum." I see a rearview mirror which sharply reflects, in reverse, another sign on the other side of the road. Simultaneously, I see trees in front of me tinged with the half-light of dusk. I can scarcely distinguish individual trees, only brown-yellow silhouettes in a golden haze. These are not just outlines but masses of color in the midst of which I discern the back of a road sign on he left side of the highway. Above I see a dense, misty, luminous, orange-beige sky. At the same time as I see all this, I suddenly realize that I am also seeing an out-of-focus rendering in my field of vision of the windshield frame, a portion of the dashboard, the taxi meter, its numerals, the driver's hack license, and an I.D. photograph.

Actually, I don't see all this.

Sugarplum

What I'm seeing is depicted in a painting, a painting titled "Sugar Plum" (1974; plate, p. 18). The painting creates the illusion of its existence as reality. The scale of the objects is exactly as I might see them. I am inside the painting. The windshield suggests an undefined space in which I sit and out of which I see. I see a painting the model for which is a photograph, a painting which shows me a unified camera derived image

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simultaneous with what I would see sequentially in real life. Which is more tangible, what I see, or what I imagine I am seeing, the latter of which characterizes what I would see if I were truly seeing? Which is more tangible, the fact that I see a painted canvas, or the fact that I might experience the reality? But the reality in question is itself "only" a photograph from which this image was painted. What I see with particular clarity is that which appears behind the windshield and is thus separated from me: a highway landscape, also a hybrid landscape, which on the one hand is romantically evocative of a drive in the country but on the other is interrupted by signals which simultaneously evoke an urban image. But in this landscape appears a roadsign -"Sugar Plum" -an image within an image within an image within an image within etc. ...That is, the image of the word within the image of the highway, in front of which a mirror image appears, within an image painted from a photographic image. A look at Kanovitz's image of banal reality tells me of the inaccuracy of my everyday way of seeing and gives me the opportunity to put it to a test. I will not only test what I see but how I see it. Would that also be a "reality check" -whatever "reality" means? Quite offhand, I ask myself about my attitude as it relates to seeing, and realize that my seeing relates to recognizing. The precision of the image leaves nothing to be desired. But precisely by means of and within the precision of the image I feel myself subject to illusion. So in the rarefied atmosphere of a museum or a gallery this deceptively authentic-looking reality is proposed to me while at the same time making me aware that this can't be reality but only an image of it. Indeed, an image of an image of this reality. I suspect that this image of reality could deceive me if I let it.

II.

In 1956, when he was 27, Howard Kanovitz's paintings had as yet