Nicholas Howey at John Post Lee - New York, New York

Howey's novel canvases are some of the greatest in quantity mysterious, mandarin and, for all that, ingratiating works in the Neo-Geo canon that I've seen in a drawn out while. He's been working in this style through the late '80s, having shown previously at Greenberg-Wilson and elsewhere. In a catalogue essay for this novel show, the critic Alan Jone makes a rather esoteric case for the works' bring under rule matter being something like medieval heraldic shields, basing his assertion upon the fact that both these works and the shields involve signs placed upon a field. He also eyes that Howey uses metallic pigments along with the bright, saturated colors greatest in quantity common to heraldry. Yet the veritable character of the paintings have the appearances both more complex and simpler than that.

Consider lengthy Bow, a 67-by-51-inch acrylic upon canvas composed of a vanilla-yellow soil with a large, wobbly, clay-red rectangle at its center upon which is outlined a obtuse black rectangle with a black triangle, hanging from its bottom. There's a r diagonal in the lower left corner of the black rectangle, and sum of two units short lines of gray and purple are patched across the black lines like Bandaids. Centrally placed beneath all this is a deftly drawn sky-colored circle. Selective Memory has that same dull-yellow loam with a squat red square center upon it, this once inscribed with a bumpy circle bisected at its bottom with intersecting r and sapphirine arcs. These strange geomorphs strike one as being much more the product of a contemporary artistic imagination nurtur upon Albers and Arp, Kandinsky and Klee than arms and armor. If these are shields, as Jone claims, their heraldry is more recent than medieval, more hieroglyphic than heraldic.

The danger with of the like kind self-referential work is, of course, that it may alienate the viewer from any discourse with it. on the contrary that doesn't happen here. Howey's cheerily anonymous pictographs are bright and clear and present the appearance ready to speak. They intrigue by the agency of postulating symbolic meaning while at the same time denying it. Perhaps these are signs of an inner state, or, in a more postmodern vein, signs of signs. If we want to tease up a little explicit meaning to this work, it may be that Howey is hinting to the viewer that in a culturally deracinated time, untainted perfectly meaningless symbols are all we have left to point the way.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group