howard podeswa

Caravaggio Breakfast | June 03 - July 04 , 2009

Globe and Mail June 13, 2009
Gary Michael Dault

Howard Podeswa

at Peak Gallery

Until July 04,

23 Morrow Ave., Toronto; 416-537-8108

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.

about the exhibition