Howard Kanovitz essays about the artist

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tangible, too, in the space between the freestanding figures and the picture on the wall. The invisible connections between all of these elements suggest space without representing it by means of perspective. Not all of Kanovitz's paintings correspond to "The Opening" or "The People" in the details of their genesis and development, but on the whole they definitely do, and certain general principles may be seen to underlie all of his work. The basic fundamental is a coming-to-terms with the world, while maintaining distance from it. To this end he utilizes found objects from everyday reality. To be sure, they are not juxtaposed in the alienating fashion dear to the Surrealists. They are instead invariably composed into an image of reality that could correspond to reality. That which does not exist quite the same way in reality is introduced as if it were real, and vice versa. Photorealism and trompe-1'oeil serve as instruments to that end.

The Opening

The claim to authenticity proper to photography is extended into painting by means of this method. Kanovitz's collage method is therefore not simply a technique but also relates to the intellectual content of his work. It creates not only visual but intellectual illusions, leading us to pose certain questions. The trompe-l'oeil becomes a trompe-l'esprit. By painting deceptively realistic copies of reality, Kanovitz is at the same time an inventor of reality, insofar as he invents realities in his paintings, which create an effect of being simple found objects that were copied -therefore real things. But he does this only the better to deceive us.

VIII.

As we have seen, Kanovitz's discovery of the cut-out in "The People" was already anticipated by his isolation of figures in front of the blank areas serving as background. Isolation represented in this fashion was transposed and thematically intensified when he went a

step further and exhibited shapes that already had a cut-out character as literal cut-outs, a step that amounted to elevating these fragments of everyday reality to an image of the whole. These cut-outs are inextricably linked to the subject by their very shape, which replicates the subject's silhouette. This correspondence between figuration and abstract image was well suited to the further refinement of Kanovitz's skill as a technician.

The People

The technique of reducing a photographic image of an object by means of a drawing to its constituent color zones and then transferring it to canvas Kanovitz was now enabled by the use of the air brush to refine to an extraordinary degree. The very fact that the subject is broken down into fields of color enabled him to work with specially cut templates and achieve subtle nuances, unimaginably delicate transitions. The use of compressed air permits extremely precise modulations and opens up all kinds of other possibilities, whether through regulating the air pressure, or varying the distance between nozzle and painting surface, or the duration of the spraying, or spraying several times with several different colors. However, this technique, distinctive as it may be at the outset, involved a certain loss of personal character. By the very fact of its perfection, the technique approaches the perfection of photography and the anonymity of photography, as well. It is not the subject that is being rendered, but its image. At the same time, the photograph becomes itself a subject. The perceptual mechanism of the camera's single eye is quite different from seeing with two eyes. To reflect this difference between the two kinds of seeing in his paintings and to make of it a thematic element was, however, secondary for Kanovitz. He instead introduced this problem as a formal element only in order to pose other questions. Our surprise and doubt about reality, which was pro-