Joel JanowitzThe work is more interpretive than Fairfield Porter's or Rackstraw Downes', say, but his quiet portrayals of the specific follows in the line of traditional landscape and still-life that those two painters most recently have brought it to. The minute details and definitions of a photograph or Dutch still-life aren't there, yet complete scenes register in the luch region of our imagination leaving clinicial every day cognizance for our next look around. They are bound by their loving attention to the actual from meandering so far from presence as to become fanciful or quixotic, but it is an interpolated mirror he holds up. "I like the way the grass becomes trees," a six-year-old viewer at the opening said. Most of the paintings contrast two scenes. In the study and final painting, Distance Between, an open newspaper is spread across the entire bottom half of the composition, painted in muted white, gray, greens and purple to give a toned down effect of black and white. In Book of Screens, the newspaper, or perhaps book, is painted with a dream landscape of gold, greens and dirt-red cloud-like formations. The top half of these paintings is a view out a window that the newspaper, or book, lies open in front of. This playful juxtaposition sets the interior observer with his privilege of mood (safe in the privacy of the enclosed apartment) in context with the risky cityscape, the external world, revealed through the window. The view of the city, though, contains mostly people-less park space with apartment buildings rising in the background, so there is a contemplative quietude that permeates the two halves and would seem to balance them. But this is exactly where the paintings become more than pretty pictures, going beyond a realist painter's simple view and response. A sense of aloneness and of time past and passing pervades. We are present at a time of waiting. There is a mysteriousness in this captured stillness—something not really seen but suggested and a willingness to allow it implied. Certain windows in the wall of apartment buildings accented with dabs of yellow, accentuate the act of a lone viewer sharing this city mood and experience. Divisions are created in other ways also. In Waiting for Morning, the reflection on the shining surface of a piece of furniture jutting diagonally back takes the horizontal lines of a window sill and open window completely across the middle of the painting. The same thing occurs in Along, a much different painting of the same scene. This panel shaped canvas features flowers (done with spots of purple, pinks and greens) in a water filled jar amid folded newspapers done again to a neutral gray and white effect. The upper half of the painting is a window done in fields of pinks, whites and purple through which we feel the intense sunlight pouring in. In Night Table, dusk's colors fire up the sky in pink above a row of tall apartment buildings seen in almost cartoon silhouette while the lower half is made up of some unnatural yellow light illuminating from below park trees with the last thrill of blue for the day. Aside, a large sunlight flooded painting of a snow-filled terrace with birds at a feeder is also cut in half but this time vertically as we stand inside at one end of a large swung open window and look out across the terrace. The colors here are much brighter than in the other paintings. Panels of pastel-hued blue, purple and green turn a background wall into a pretty invention; especially with the birds at the feeder and a snow-topped hanging plant with some winter dormant branches sticking out seen in the foreground. There are a lot of different kinds of painting going on in this winter scene. The bird feeder is in focus but this is seen alongside the much more abstract and tropical handling of the building on the other side of the boundary window. This brings in the element of time since the viewer focuses in on one section then another the way they would in taking in a scene anywhere. The viewing becomes an act of discovery as the painting unfolds. We move through it from place to place, journeying through the space rather than taking it all in instantaneously. Janowitz is very fine in putting colors next to each other. There are constant surprises. A royal blue cup casts a purple triangular shadow on an ochre table, itself composed with triangular patterns. Folded newspapers and a telephone are painted in an almost ghastly pink. Green plants, a blue-green wall and a royal blue filling a window, altogether create the thick somber mood of a late afternoon raga. The subject matter in Joel Janowitz's paintings in his last several shows at this gallery and one last fall at the Victoria Munroe Gallery in NYC (where he now lives), has continuously changed. There were series of highway vistas as seen from behind a steering wheel, cows in landscapes and lush greenhouse interiors. In all of them he highlighted the ordinary with the use of photo-quick compositional arrangement: portions of the car's interior framed the window views, urban infringements stood blatant in the cow pastorals and images reflected off windows in the steamy greehouses. He's always adding to the seen, exploring arrangements to more than notice. By the act of selecting a particular scene to depict, a judgment has been made and a degree of sentiment is unavoidable in the resulting interpretation, but the moods in these paintings are restless not romantic. They're further kept in check by the expressionist techniques in the application of paint and variety of brushed textures that give the scenes a fiery urgency. It is the combination of these methods with the realist's celebration of the moment of a scene that distinguishes this painter and should bring him further recognition. (ARTS, December 1984) |