NYAB Event - Jaya Howey Exhibition

Jaya Howey Exhibition

Taxter & Spengemann

This event has ended.

For his fourth solo exhibition at Taxter & Spengemann, Jaya Howey introduces a group of light infused, vividly colored, large-scale abstractions on canvas. In these latest works the process of taping off has partially given way to the hollowed out and drippy mark making of masking fluid; while layers of heavily turpentined oil paint are laid down in rag-rubbed swaths. The hand appears to have overtaken self-consciousness, fore-grounding the libidinous and sensual aspects of the medium.

Still Howey is no flippant libertine and control has not been utterly abandoned. In this way, the paintings mimic the orgiastic order of the Happy Hardcore Techno (a spazzy sub-genre of club music defined by an excessive 180 beats per minute coupled with sentimentalized female vocals) on which Howey has lately been fixating. Techno eliminates typical musical virtuosity in favor of formal simplicity. It focuses on uplift, repetition, dynamic shift, and the build up of breathless anticipation and cathartic release within each composition. Howey’s gridded blocks of color make up the steady back-beat while swirls and stripes of vivid, nearly Day-Glo pink and aquamarine, and areas of impossibly vacant, pristine white bring to mind dynamic flourishes and rests. Phrases from Happy Hardcore songs (the genre is not typically celebrated for the incisive poetry of its lyrics) occasionally make their way into the compositions as well. Handwritten exhortations such as “No one’s judging you” scrawled across the canvas, are as buoying for artist and viewer as they are for the E-addled dancer. Even as the frenzied rhythm of brash colors excites the euphoria gives way to Howey’s and our judgmental reality. It’s no-exit escapism: a painterly freedom that is fully aware of the confinements of abstraction, the fractured factions of Howey’s peer-group and the capricious reality of the marketplace.

If the treatment of paint in these works is exceedingly transparent, then there is also a certain conceptual transparency of purpose: a forthright disavowal of fear and second-guessing. Moves, gestures and marks flow freer than ever and cavalier color choices are the rule, prodding a viewer to pleasure on its own merits...go ahead, no one’s judging you.

Note: Downstairs David Chieppo

[Image: Jaya Howey "Pink & Red #3" Oil on canvas 78.7 x 70.9 in.]