Howard Fonda: Howard Fonda
Mixed Greens, New York, New York 2011
I met a genius on the train
today
about 6 years old,
he sat beside me
and as the train
ran down along the coast
we came to the ocean
and then he looked at me
and said,
it’s not pretty.
it was the first time I’d
realized
that.
—Charles Bukowski
Mixed Greens is thrilled to announce Howard Fonda’s fifth solo exhibition with the gallery. In his eponymously titled exhibition, he will exhibit a new series of abstract oil paintings.
Bukowski’s poem, I Met A Genius, describes a moment of seeing things for what they really are—overcoming assumptions and formal education to reveal truths. Fonda is searching for those moments in painting by pushing himself to navigate color and form with fresh eyes that not only reveal beauty, but its opposite. The mark making is riskier, the colors more natural, and the paint thicker and more dense. He is intuitively going back to basics, where a large palette and a blank canvas are the main protagonists. They are paintings.
Since Fonda began making paintings, he has been on a quest for sincerity and truth in mark making. That exploration has inspired him to paint still lifes, portraits, patterns, even recreate Manet’s last flower paintings, and paint a series of trees in an attempt to blur the boundaries between representation and abstraction. To the viewer, these new works may have connections to stained glass, portraits, or landscapes. To Fonda, they are full of the effort required to make something effortless. In this new body of work, Fonda relies on color and form alone to reach out of his comfort zone and into a space where successes and failures coexist. The finished works reveal his process and his never-ending search.