| Howard Podeswa at Peak Gallery
Within the affable, rumpled, homey, aw-shucks kind of guy Toronto
artist Howard Podeswa appears to be lurks an incandescently brilliant
and strangely visionary mind -- and heart.
He has spent a lot of selfless time in South Africa, for example,
"just helping out" in one of the urgently needful villages
he found there a few years ago. Last year he published a book
of computer systems analysis called UML for the ITBA (Unified
Modelling Language for the Information Technology Business Analyst).
Some of the computer diagrams, he simply dreamed, Podeswa tells
me with a certain childlike wonder in his voice, adding that they
proved to work.
He is also an artist of prodigious gifts, much given, earlier
in his career, to painting the fruits and vegetables piled near
what used to be his Kensington Market studio. You want an unforgettable
painting of a red pepper or a bundle of asparagus? Podeswa is
your man. There is a Podeswa painting of a stalk of Brussels sprouts
in a Kensington Market coffee shop that is the very apotheosis
of that baroque vegetable.
Speaking of the baroque brings us to this new exhibition of Podeswa's
at Peak Gallery, titled After Las Meninas.
Las Meninas, usually translated, misleadingly, as The Ladies-in-Waiting,
or, better, as The Royal Family, is the undisputed masterpiece
of the great Spanish painter Diego Velazquez (1599-1660).
This mysterious and endlessly interpreted painting, which is in
the Prado in Madrid, shows Velazquez working on a gigantic canvas,
presumably a double portrait of King Philip IV of Spain and his
wife, Queen Mariana, accompanied by their daughter, the Infanta
Margarita, and various ladies in waiting, some of whom are dwarfs,
such as Mari Barbola, known as the "dwarf of dreadful appearance."
The virtuoso painting is enigmatic in the extreme, beginning with
questions about who is where. Where, exactly, are the royal couple?
Velazquez seems to be looking intently out at us. So do they,
his ostensible subjects, occupy the same space we do as viewers
(i.e. outside the canvas)? Or is that them reflected in what appears
to be a mirror on the far wall of the room where Velazquez is
painting?
Anyhow, the questions, which may be finally unanswerable, pile
up.
The questions pile up in Podeswa's show too: He saw the Velazquez
at the Prado and was never able to forget it. And the current
show, which opens today, is made up of the artist's obsessive
and often puzzling anatomy of the painting, and of other paintings
he has related to it -- Rembrandt's The Night Watch, for example,
and works by John Singer Sargent and Thomas Eakins.
Much of the show is sketchy, unsettlingly sketchy. The paintings
are Podeswa feeling his way into the masters he so passionately
admires and their tentativeness is both understandable and, frankly,
a bit off-putting. The best paintings here are the ones agglomerated with pigment,
like the face of Mari Barbola conflated with the face of his own
son.
$1,000-$8,000. Until March 18, 23 Morrow Ave., Toronto; 416-537-8108
about the exhibition
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