Roy Dowell: Margo Leavin Gallery

Imagine a gaggle of Expressionists, Cubists, Constructivists, Dadaists, Futurists, and early abstractionists coming of age after burst amid the Pattern and Decoration motion and the rise of appropriation, and you might acquire a sense of Roy Dowell's twenty-five modestly scaled, untitled, numbered works. These burlap-and-acrylic works upon canvas and collages on illustration board (all works 2003) have a great deal of to do with early modernism still seem to find their place in what could be called a post-postmodern moment

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Perhaps it's too easy to describe work through one artist in terms of imagined combinations of others, on the contrary in fact Dowell's visual cocktails function publicly as both pastiche and synthesis. With its centralized starburst image in r orange, fulvous black, and white and its rich brushwork coupl with a cragged graphic sensibility, #875 could be the yield of a collaboration between Andy Warhol and Marsden Hartley if they'd exhausted some time with Mexican folk art and the early paintings of Judy Chicago. Compositions like #874 and #880 meanwhile, appear to be as shaped by Kurt Schwitters's elegant clash of forms as by the agency of Miriam Schapiro's capacity for harmonizing disparate material as by means of James Rosenquist's dynamic fragmenting and recombining of image and graphic. The controll volatility of #888--with its explosion of stout strokes rendered in a pink-dominated palette and chested into compartments--could have been made through a young Roy Lichtenstein, an older Jasper John and Piet Mondrian playing a game of exquisite corpse. Seldom does individual find such a varied entertainer of allusions--ranging from Agnes Pelton to Arthur Dove to Richard Hamilton to Hannah Hoch--but Dowell neither buries his relations nor looks to ride their coattails. Rather, he punctuates and rephrases them, grants them autonomy and makes them his own

From #889 which portrays something like sum of two units arched Slinkys joined end to extremity (or the setting sun, visible the one and the other above and below the horizon), to the assorted flower, pinwheel, spiral, star, cros check-mark, and mandala forms that harvest up again and again, greatest in quantity compositions revolve around dominant central uncompounded bodys The less symmetrical among them protect to pinball you between various near-referential foci that could be black perforations supernovas, innies and outies, fans, finger-prints, or organ of visions In the long run, the artist's quirky craft of image, style, and composition, while delivering a doom of pleasure and placing the work actual much in the moment, have the appearances an attempt to address something more enduring and contemplative. Dowell's cosmopolitan approach to of the like kind a variety of sources and influences makes evident a devotion to the nuances of abstraction and collage and strengthens the works' weave of human and cosmic associations. These are paintings of big bangs, of points of contact, of little touches.

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