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Applying paint in thick strokes rather than emphasizing detail, he had
already begun to avoid narrative or simply dramatic effects, just as in
the more mature paintings of his realistic period. As to theme, "Four
A.M. Eastern Standard Time" (1956) is a transitional work. Expressively
depicted is a jam session of the Earl Kay Quartet, to which Kanovitz used
to belong as a jazz trombonist. He stands on the left with his instrument,
apart from his friends. The theme of isolation--of loneliness while being
with others--that is so often seen in later works, is here already made
manifest. During a stay in Europe from 1956 to 1958 the break with his
earlier aesthetic ideals was already in the making. Responding to the
artistic refinement and cool precision of 15th century, Florentine painting,
as well as its balance between figurative representation and abstract
principles of composition, he realized that he would have to take a new
path which would lead him in a direction away from Franz Kline and Abstract
Expressionism. "I rediscovered painting," he says, "and knew what I had
to do." Namely, he developed a figurative style built on his Italian experience.
His paintings were to be cool, not hot, in order to emphasize thought
more than spontaneity. They were to maintain a distance from the subject,
an economy of means, and a control of the emotions. Upon his return from
Europe with its subsequent "culture shock," Kanovitz studied Art History
(with, among others, Irwin Panofsky) and took a sabbatical from painting.
When he resumed his work it was abstract, but with a hint of figuration.
These still-life-like architectural compositions reveal the artist's admiration
for Matisse's simplification of and concentration on the essentials, combined
with as Kanovitz puts it, "the generosity of his aesthetics."
This foretells the prevailing attitude in the realistic paintings "Hermaphrodite"
(1963) and "Nude Greek Reclining (1965 which quotes Manet's "Olympia")
to the recent series of window paintings. In the last five years he has
begun to create works which contrast layers of paintings within paintings.
Kanovitz' work is never intellectually over-bearing although the artistic
refinement is highly complex. Figures and objects, though they are abundant
in associations, are not agitated but seen at rest, and thereby become
the artist's pictorial signs.
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His goal however, is not complexity. He still has an abstract view of
things. Only in this way, he says, can he avoid total identification with
the images in his paintings, which spring from personal experience, always
provided by outside stimuli. It was an event unrelated to painting that
was instrumental in turning Kanovitz into a Photorealist. After his father's
death in 1963 he was leafing through old family albums. There he recognized
reproductions of the ordinary, coincidental, and banal, to be "abstraction
from reality.." as Jorn Merkert, curator of the exhibition, described
it. It is unimportant whether Kanovitz was first inspired by newspaper
clippings or photographs. Later he perfected photographic skills and began
to use a slide projector as an additional tool. Never is he aiming only
for the most perfect reproduction of a reproduction. The photo is not
the subject but the starting point of the composition, just as any sketch
would be. Unlike the Swiss artist Franz Gertsch (ART 5/1987), Kanovitz
does not project slides directly onto the canvas in order to fill them
with paint and monumentalize them. Instead, Kanovitz interjects the drawing
as a mediary, so that it governs the composition. Thus photography becomes
an instrument for painting. This is the spirit of his work process. This
does not deny the aesthetic dimension of photography, its tonal modulations
being one of its important refinements. Kanovitz' use of the air brush
translates this soft and fluid shading. The camera is limited, however,
in its capacity to shape reality while Kanovitz' ambitious goal is to
provoke the viewer with the contrast between "hyper" realistic detail
and abstract composition. His paintings of the seventies easily demonstrate
how this dialectic works: "Hotel Quai Voltaire"
(1974), with its clear, segmented composition, its use of color, and even
the treatment of the quilt ornaments, shows the artist's admiration for
the Fauve Matisse.
"Journal"
(1972-73), inspired by Pop Art's blow-up technique, illustrates the contrast
between a realistic foreground and a free-floating background. This painting
clarifies Kanovitz' interest in interpreting the real. Seemingly small
alterations invoke distance and give a new concreteness to the work. The
eyes of the diva (Mia Farrow) mirror a reality outside the painting and
the evanescence of the acrylic paint moves the portrait into the realm
of the unreal. The artistic theme that Kanovitz continues to develop in
this period is not that of how to turn banality into something beautiful,
but of how to weave together illusion and reality. This alludes strongly
to the conceptual component of his work.
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