painting | june 07- july 01, 2006

GALLERY GOING
V is for vulture (or not)
GARY MICHAEL DAULT
John Heward at Peak Gallery
$5,000-$20,000. Until July 1,
23 Morrow Ave., Toronto;
416-537-8108

Veteran Montreal painter and drummer John Heward tends to see things pretty much as they are, and it will come as no great surprise to anyone at all familiar with his work -- with his visual art, with his improvisational music, or with his taut, spare writing -- that he has titled his new exhibition simply Painting.

It would be entirely in the spirit of Heward's brand of minimalism merely to say that this new exhibition, now at the Peak Gallery, is just that: paintings. More specifically, however, it is a selection of paintings in black ink on heavy, unstretched swatches of the artist's trademark white rayon, loosely pinned up on the gallery walls (the artist's trademark way of hanging them). There are four paintings in the exhibition, and they are all called Untitled (Gesture). The gesture in question has supplied each of the white cloths with a single configuration -- a black, rough, calligraphically frayed "V" shape in its middle.

But of course simply stating that isn't going to be quite enough. And besides, there's more work in the exhibition: In

addition to the four paintings, there are also three large works that also share one title: Abstraction. These majestic pieces lie somewhere -- I was going to say fall somewhere, which would be literally true -- between painting and sculpture or installation (or architecture). Each of them is a soft cloth pillar made of a number of rayon cloths on which Heward has previously painted. Their sculptural presence comes from his having gathered the cloths into a single vertical object (having knotted or folded or somehow slung them together) and pinned it to the gallery ceiling. The intermingled cloths tumble together from the top of the gallery to the bottom, where they finally (sometimes) acquire a tenuous footing by slightly bunching up on the floor.

The abstractions are cunningly contrived to change their appearance radically in the course of your time spent with them: Each of them reveals a bit of painting here and a bit there (a sudden black circle on one side, a passage of brick-red near the bottom on the other side, and so on) as you walk around them. They may look more or less furled, but they stretch out luxuriously and sensuously in time and through space.

But what of the untitled V paintings? What are we to make of them? "I've heard all the interpretations," Heward says with a mock-weary fall in his voice and an inextinguishable twinkle in his eye. Interpretations? Oh, right. About how people keep seeing things in them: seagulls, eagles, vultures, wishbones, peace signs.

Of course you know perfectly well that all such desperate image-identification is going to be irrelevant to Heward.

He calls the paintings "gestures," after all. No, what matters for Heward is the improvising. The act. The expressive doing. And the Vs? Well, the Vs are simply what have been left behind -- this time. Their task is to proclaim: "John Heward was here."

about the exhibition