"redux" new painting | October 03 - October 27, 2007

Rembrandt's The Night Watch (The Militia Company of Captain Banning Cocq) from 1642 is one of what Toronto painter Howard Podeswa calls his "pilgrimage paintings" - that is to say, one of those paintings he has gone out of his way to see as many times as he could. (He has seen The Night Watch, at Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum, seven times.) Podeswa's last exhibition stringently anatomized another of his attitude-forming masterpieces of the past, Velazquez's La Meninas (The Royal Family) of 1656-57 at the Prado in Madrid.

How do these homages to his painter-heroes manifest themselves? Well, aspects of the Velazquez work tended to find their way into a number of Podeswa's paintings and drawings made from the original work.

But not so here. For this highly accomplished new exhibition, titled Redux, Podeswa has deconstructed the Rembrandt by means of a suite of exquisitely painted abstract pictures. These paintings are populated by strange geometric figures, which look a bit like chess pieces, or like those striped poles that Venetian gondoliers moor their boats to, or the painted objects that punctuate the lonely streets of paintings by Giorgio de Chirico. These enigmatic figure-objects are used to indicate both the complex spatial organization of the original mural-sized Rembrandt and, in addition, something of the oddness and inscrutability of the big picture's meaning.

"It's a great but flawed painting," says Podeswa of The Night Watch, "like a brilliant Persian carpet." A brilliant Persian carpet with built-in "errors." Sometimes, it's easy to read back The Night Watch from Podeswa's abstractions of it - the golden drum at the right of Rembrandt's painting is easy enough to spot, for example, even in its now abstracted form.

But the rest of Podeswa's beautiful Night Watch glosses are not so transparent. The exhibition is, in fact, sensuous and difficult in equal measure - and, as a consequence, is perhaps Podeswa's best show to date.