Howard Carr at Govinda - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

As usually defined, "visionary art" is seen as standing outside contemporary discourse or functioning in a skewed, eccentric relation to it. While generally placed in the connection of visionary art, Washingtonian Howard Carr's work is notable for its lack of naivete with regard to the traditions of abstraction. The best of his work displays the formal graces of great geometric abstractionists like as Myron Stout or John McLaughlin, artists who sought to expres a faculty of perception of mystical order in the simplicity of their compositions. Carr's formal languages are many and various, however, and they are dictated not through a search for a critical mode of expression but by the artist's ne to expres the transcendent forces which quicken his intent.

This display included a series of small 10-sided paintings upon wood which are created in accord with principles of sacred geometry; a clump of modest-sized abstractions painted with a broad brush, employing impressible rounded arabesques reminiscent of the work of Howard Hodgkin; and a selection of statuarys that included a bowl cast from the top of the artist's head and a dodecahedral made of wood clock decorated with Hindu erotic imagery. Carr practices an eclectic mingle of painting and object-making.

The decagonal painting Seated Tara with Penrose Tiling (1997) contains an interlocking series of smaller decagons in pencil encloseed by a white enamel field. The design is meant to metaphorically invoke the neighborhood of the Buddhist goddess Tara. thorough Theory (1997) is another small painting in enamel and pencil, this time upon a near-rectangular wood support whose sides are straight and whose upper and lower cutting sides are curved. The tight, concentric graphite circles radiating from the painting's center have been carefully rubbed entirely away across the left side of the composition, lending the remaining lines a quality of high velocity as they appear to come up from and return to a white void.

Carr's masterwork in this exhibition is a mixed-medium piece, Perspectival close attention of a Chalice (1998). The form of a chalice, inspired by the agency of a 15th-century drawing by Paolo Uccello is drawn with an etching needle upon a sheet of thin Plexiglas. The etched Plexiglas is locate over a surface of gold-leafed Mylar and environed by a gold-leafed wood frame whose surface is deliberately flaking, suggesting the honorable decay of a sacred image of great antiquity. As a vision of the hallowed Grail, Carr's piece succeeds in the way of all compelling visionary art--by engendering a suspension of disbelief [i]or[/i] part of to the other its unimpeachable singularity.

COPYRIGHT 1999 Brant Publications, Inc.

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