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June 03 - July 04

opening June 04, 2-8PM
Howard Podeswa

"Caravaggio Breakfast" - new paintings

review

 

My work often is triggered by a change in physical surroundings. This series began with a studio move to 30 Duncan St., when I began to look outside my window for material I could use to construct my paintings. As my eye settled on particularities, I selected and recombined these details to create my own versions of the view outside, piecing them together in a way that resembles the order I noticed them, while weeding out extraneous details - something I have been doing since I began painting the urban landscape. The wild card in each piece is the art-historical sample.
This use of other artists’ work is an evolution of what I have been doing in previous shows. Previously, I focused on analyzing the inner structure and mechanics of art-historical paintings (Las Meninas and The Night Watch).  In the current work, I’m more interested in combining the distinct visual particularities of different periods and places.  This has become, for me, an engrossing game.  The things I notice in a masterwork are similar to those I notice in the urban landscape when I look out the window – not iconic aspects but distinct visual particularities that others might miss but that define the masterwork or the urban scene.

Howard Podeswa

 

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Review | Globe and Mail
Michael Gary Dault

Howard Podeswa at Peak Gallery

Until July 04,

After intense and prolonged sojourns in the painterly deconstructing and examination - in study after study, painting after painting - of Velasquez's Las Meninas and Rembrandt's The Night Watch, Howard Podeswa has now stepped back a little from his relentless and inspired anatomizing of these two inexhaustible masterworks to re-insert himself into the workings of his own art, now juxtaposed to and nourished by some of the monuments of art history.

This melding of past and present takes the form, in his exhibition titled Caravaggio Breakfast, of Podeswa extending his gaze from the windows of his new downtown Toronto studio all the way back to the terrain of some of the painters he admires from the past (Caravaggio, Goya, Rubens, Pissarro, Edward Hopper), and generating an array of cunningly hybridized paintings.

There is a tiny painting, for example (Detail Autumn Landscape with View of Het Steen), which is a bit of peripheral landscape lying behind something important in a Rubens. There are exhilarating riffs in which Goya's late black paintings meet the rooftops of Duncan Street in Toronto. And, speaking of Goya, there is, in this engrossingly conceived and exquisitely managed exhibition, a real masterpiece of enlightened pastiche: Podeswa's From the Plains of San Isidoro - a green painting of a plain, viewed from far above, peopled with figures and made in such a way (with half of the painting nothing but empty greensward) that you'd think that Goya (whose painting lies at the heart of this new version) had paused to paint and then simply moved on.

Detail Colossus I, 2009, acrylic on canvas, 11” x 14”