Howard Kanovitz essays about the artist

Poetic Blend Of Day And Dream
by Karl Ruhrberg

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In "The Painting Wall and Water Bucket Stool" (1958), the stool is casting a shadow of steel.

Painting Wall And Waterbucket Stool

Following such ironic insights were "cut-outs" painted on canvas and mounted on wood. They were free-standing silhouetted paintings without background. "The idea was to excite the viewer's imagination," says the artist. This is defined again in "Chair and Shadow" (1987), when he gives both objects the same material presence. The surprising effect of trompe-l'oeil works that followed the cut-outs and attracted attention at Documenta 5 soon ceased to satisfy Kanovitz. He continues to use these concepts on a new and advanced level. For example, he contrasts a ship in a moonlit bay with a perfectly executed upside-down bedpost casting a shadow ("Toward the Bay " 1986), and combines painting and object through the appearance of a romantic landscape inside the solid architectural wood frame of a door ("Full Moon Door," 1984). Even more important in his works of the eighties is his use of interconnected transparent layers reminiscent of the disparate images in the work of the Belgian surrealist, Rene Magritte. For

example, an open grand piano and a chair are placed in front of an illusion, perhaps the shadow of a windowed wall, both standing in water ("The Grand Piano," 1987). In Kanovitz' "Terrasse at Barnes Landing," Claude Monet's famous "Terasse at Sainte-Adresse" rests on an easel before a narrow coastal landscape, the hills of which permeate the clouds and sky above, the easel, and the painting within the painting.

Terasse At Barnes Landing

The many paintings within paintings correspond to unending variations on reality and perception in that nothing is as it first seems. Reality is not on the surface. In the mingling of past and present, day and dream, the memory is as real as the moment of experience. These paintings show Kanovitz at the zenith of his artistic brilliance. He does not allow them to become ends in themselves in definable categories. The mythology of the ordinary has begun its poetic phase without severing its connection with reality. As Guiseppe Verdi, the great realist among the composers of the 19th century said: "Reproducing reality may be good, but inventing reality is better, much better." Kanovitz does both, and it is this that gives substance and perspective to his work.