Howard Lonn
"Howard Lonn" by Liz Wylie, Summer 2007, p. 85
Now in mid-career, the Toronto-based painter Howard Lonn has hit his stride with feisty new works that focus on fragments of the built environment. Lonn creates a fantastical invented realm in which weird forms and shifts in scale keep the viewer slightly on edge. Are we looking, for example, at a suspended steel girder caught in motion as it careens through space, or at a bit of a machine? Three works on paper bearing images of satellite dishes—cold black orbs set against lines of scraped and dragged aluminum enamel and black oil paint—present a shimmering tackiness and a hard graphic quality that harks back to the radicalism of Rauschenberg’s first photo silkscreens. Lonn’s straightforward, guileless, unpopulated urbanscapes have a roving and restless feel, as though they have been glimpsed only briefly on the way to another destination. Their meaning rests in the artist’s engagement with the imagery and in the works’ mediation of the language and history of painting.
“Silent Running,” the exhibition’s title, makes reference to the 1972 dystopian cult film starring Bruce Dern, whose character tends biosphere pods on a spaceship because Earth can no longer support plant life. While the title is used by Lonn in a somewhat tongue-in-cheek manner, the eerie silence of the movie permeates the exhibition. It is as though a mute button is on as we survey the often-hovering building elements. By floating his objects in mid-air, Lonn is able to eliminate any horizon line, and the viewer likewise feels airborne.
Lonn is a master of underpainting and has built each work using a long and multi-faceted process. At times it seems he has only just barely resolved things—some compositions have been topped off with a thin, milky coating of white paint that reads like a sheet hastily pulled over a messy bed. But Lonn’s paintings are not overworked or overwrought. In fact, they have an amazing looseness and breath to them. The colours are lighthearted, at times almost amusing, with a wonderfully quirky range and intriguing play of juxtapositions.
Howard Lonn is clearly an engaged painter. To look at his pictures is to see him firmly in the middle of what he is doing, not off to one side wringing his hands over the status of painting.
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