ROY DOWELL 2024 by Miles McEnery Gallery

ROY DOWELL

511 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011

515 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011

525 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011

520 West 21st Street New York NY 10011

THE REAL THING By David Pagel

Roy Dowell makes paintings because he wants to see things he has never seen. That’s the opposite of what visionaries do when they paint or draw: They report back on what they’ve seen in their imaginations—or dreams—by bringing those images and stories to life. The resulting works attest to the singularity, perspicacity, and insightfulness of their visions, which some believe spring from the unconscious and others locate in more spiritual, yet similarly unfathomable, sources. 3

What Dowell does in the studio is also the opposite of what Realists do when they make art: Realists take viewers beyond surface appearances to capture what they believe to be the underlying truth of the world, giving the situations and circumstances they address more clarity than we would have without the help of their insistent, unflinching works, which are sometimes incisive, are often ugly, and are always unforgiving. Dowell, on the other hand, gives shape in his paintings to a world he has not previously seen or imagined—or even fantasized about, in his wildest dreams. That’s pretty ambitious. But there’s nothing excessive, far-fetched, outlandish, unbelievable, or even fanciful about Dowell’s blunt, down-to-earth works, which are approachable, unpresuming, and forthright. When Dowell makes a painting, he doesn’t make anything up. Everything, in every last one of the intimately scaled works on paper that he has been making for the last two years, seems to have been found, borrowed, and repurposed—sourced from the world around us. He makes use of the reality anyone (and everyone) can see if they pay attention to the visual phenomena that are commonly thought to belong to the image glut of modern life—an overwhelming,

incessant, and inconceivably vast assault on our eyeballs, never mind our minds and sensibilities, that has intensified and expanded exponentially since the digital phase of the information age hit us like a tsunami about forty years ago. The shapes in Dowell’s paintings are as simple as simple can be: rectangles, triangles, and circles, almost always drawn by hand but occasionally made with the help of a ruler. (Sometimes a square sneaks into the picture, but, because Dowell eyeballs his shapes, their sides are rarely the same length, so even the ones that appear to be squares are, strictly speaking, not true squares.) Even preschoolers are familiar with the basic shapes that are Dowell’s bread and butter, able to recognize them well before they learn the word “geometry,” or know anything about that branch of math. And, like many grammar school exercises, which are repeated until their lessons become second nature, repetition is Dowell’s stock-in-trade, his modus operandi, his superpower. 4

Sometimes Dowell doubles triangles to make diamonds, which he repeats to form patterns that might be opaque or translucent or both. Their alternating shapes block out portions of what he had previously painted while letting us glimpse what once covered the work’s surface, or at least a good portion of it. Dowell puts circles to similar uses. In some works, he abuts coin- or baseball-size circles, with the circumference of one circle just kissing the circumference of another, and so on and so forth, until a string of discs—never orbs—is suggested. In other works, he lays out smaller circles, like the ones that appear on dice or dominoes, creating patterned planes that appear to hover just in front of the fields and the shapes behind them or appear to punch through the picture plane and open onto surfaces further off in the distance, perhaps walls, windows, or deep, dark wells. Sometimes, his arrangements of circles appear to extend beyond one or more of the edges of his abstract compositions, suggesting an expansive and more or less uniform pattern. At other times, these patterns inhabit just a section of the overall composition, punctuating the whole with DIY punctuation marks—idiosyncratic, self-styled glyphs that interrupt your effort to “read” the piece as a resolved and harmonious whole, as a singular thing, or as a consistent, same-all-the-way-through work of art.

Seurat, Georges A Sunday on La Grande Jette, 1884 Oil on canvas, 81 3/4 x 121 1/4 inches, 207.5 x 308.1 cm The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL

In still other works, Dowell inscribes circles within circles, constructing concentric rings that recall targets and mandalas and, in some instances, street signs, albeit for a world whose traffic patterns bear little resemblance to our own and whose signs seem to mark journeys far off the beaten path. Some of these segmented circles sit still, like the icons in shrines that believers set up in their homes or their more modern versions, icons that appear on the screens that everyone uses and that, with a single click, deliver people from all walks of life through digital portals that open onto other worlds where our powers are enhanced by the invisible software and complex hardware that we can make use of without understanding how they work. Other segmented circles in Dowell’s works seem to spin, like pinwheels or windmills or scientific devices—rotoscoping, in the mind’s eye, while reflecting what our eyeballs do when we look at his imaginatively animated works: circle around and spiral across their meticulously engineered surfaces, skittering and jumping, bumping up against some things and doubling back to revisit others, dancing and leaping as your imagination is drawn into the action that has attracted your eyes, well before your brain has had a chance to catch up with the bodily pleasures that have been orchestrated. In addition to all of that, Dowell treats circles as if they are dots, but his are too meaty and too messy to be the one-dimensional points we know from geometry. The dots in his works are more like handmade versions of what dot-matrix printers once churned out, or the love children of Pointillist paintings from the 1880s and comic strips from a Sunday newspaper from the 1960s.

Color plays an equally important part in Dowell’s art, rivaling shape in significance, ingenuity, and impact. Like the shapes that make up his compositions, his palette is simple: the primaries (red, blue, and yellow), plus the secondaries (green and orange, with pink replacing purple), along with black, white, and brown. Black is often, but not always, used for outlines. Most important, none of Dowell’s colors is uniform. Just about every shape in every painting is made of many washy veils of Flashe, a vinyl-based paint known for its almost chalky finish. Flashe absorbs light like no other paint, swallowing up glossiness and the reflections glossy surfaces generate in the same way that black holes swallow up everything within their gravitational pull. The magic of Flashe is that it allows for colors to be intense and dry, radiant and sunbaked, soft but not faded. People usually describe intense colors as being supersaturated. But that language is too linked to liquidity to capture the powdery presence of surfaces covered with Flashe.

And Dowell takes Flashe to extremes, often thinning his paints with so much water that each layer, when it dries, is translucent, like a veil or whiff of tinted air. He also applies layer upon layer upon layer, often shifting the colors of each wash subtly and with great nuance. A single section of a painting, which may appear, at first, to be uniform, consistent, and homogenous, actually consists of dozens, if not hundreds, of miniscule shifts in tint and tone. The density and impact of each slips, unpredictably, as your eyes glide across the surfaces of his works. At other times, Dowell goes for more dramatic shifts when he adds a new layer of paint, jumping across the spectrum. Whether those moves are from dark to light or light to dark, the most recently applied color is affected by the colors that lie beneath it, which haunt it like ghosts or resonate like echoes. Sometimes Dowell locks down a composition by eliminating details and blocking out a large or small section, like an edit that makes everything more concise, spot-on, or point-blank. But more often, he dials down his colors as he paints layer after layer. This necessitates slow reads rather than fast takes, satisfyingly long looks rather than swift glances. Dowell is a connoisseur of inconsistency. Marshaling visual jumps, color shifts, and compositional disruptions, he makes disparate things play well with one another— against very long odds. His paintings are electrified by the precariousness of the

endeavor. There is a sense that the beauty he has cobbled together is hard-won— that it could have crumbled at any step along the way and that it had better be enjoyed, right here and right now, because there’s no guarantee that you’ll come across it again. Even if you do, you’ll probably see it differently, experience it in a new way. This is where wisdom enters the equation, endowing Dowell’s modest works with a kind of existential impact that is belied by their size, not to mention the materials and the humble handiwork he brings to them. The basic shapes in Dowell’s paintings play so well with one another that many merge, cross-pollinate, and mutate. In short, they carry on all kinds of visual intercourse with single and multiple partners, both sensibly and promiscuously, playfully and purposefully. And it seems that they do so just because they can—for no other reason than the fun of it. In any case, their freewheeling, catch-as-catchcan interactions result in lively compositions that are a pleasure to see, again and again. This is precisely because so many of their components can be paired with other components, this way and that, temporarily and with no strings attached. What seemed simple, still, and serene is all of that and a whole lot more: complex and fluid, labile and animate. It can be rearranged, in the mind’s eye, over and over again. In Dowell’s hands, circles sometimes combine with lines, both curved and clustered—like plant stems and buds, like arabesques and asterisks—to make organic shapes, like spores or snowflakes, like fronds and flowers, like vines and pine trees. In a handful of works, unrecognizable letters and unidentifiable digits appear in the background or foreground, their silhouettes intimating an illegible language—one we might read, if only we were familiar with its alphabet and grammar. Just over a third of the works in Dowell’s current suite of paintings follow, fairly freely, the format of still lifes: tabletop views of stacked and clustered items, perhaps fruits and vegetables, bowls and cannisters, vases and flowers, condiment containers and decorative centerpieces. But such interpretations are always open to doubt— and to other, subsequent impressions. None can be nailed down with any sort of certainty. Everything is open to reinterpretation. Revisions happen as a matter of course.

About a third of Dowell’s works contain patterns piled atop one another. All appear homemade, even funky. Some seem chaotic until you tap into their visual rhythms, which pulse like bass lines or flow like undercurrents, through their overlapping, interacting shapes. The vast majority of the circular, rectangular, and triangular shapes that make up the components of Dowell’s idiosyncratic patterns are translucent, leaving ghostly traces of other layers, other shapes, other patterns. It’s a peculiar version of collage; it’s not cut-and-paste juxtaposition so much as interwoven strands, like threads that make fabrics or reeds that make baskets. Dowell uses translucence as a multiplier: His works are made up of more than one surface—often three or four, sometimes five, six, or seven. And no bedrock lies behind his multi-surfaced works: Everything that matters is visible on the surface, because that is all anyone has access to. No secrets, hidden meanings, or coded messages are present or suggested. Likewise, Dowell’s works never pretend to begin with blank slates or with fantasies of virgin states to be conquered, controlled, and owned. His art is not about dominion in any way, shape, or form. On the contrary, everything in his patient and painstakingly reworked compositions is a matter of adjusting well-used shapes, of mixing impure colors, and of calibrating part-by-part compositions. Everything has been resourcefully resourced and transformed into something filled with so many possibilities that the question of whether it is new or original becomes irrelevant, beside the point, even silly. Whether a composition works is all that matters. And Dowell’s works work, stimulating interest and exciting the imagination, 24/7/365. The third and slightly smaller group of Dowell’s works might be described as the oddballs if all of his works weren’t so odd, so eccentric, so radically individuated. This last group of works consists, predominantly, of two-part set-ups. They are not so much diptychs as compositions divided into two parts: Some are set off by pennant-like triangles, and others are constructed from a kind of mirrored doubling— like cells undergoing mitosis or objects visible alongside their reflections in a mirror. Even though there’s an iconic quality to almost all of Dowell’s compositions, it’s an off-center, off-balance, cock-eyed set-up: Neither authoritarian nor static, the icons in Dowell’s images require neither worship nor subservience, neither homage nor awe. What they require is attentiveness and focus, both concentration and being

fully present, but only so you can see—and experience—how generative and openended they are. In the same way that Dowell’s shapes merge and mutate, his three formats—tabletop still lifes, piled-up patterns, and diptych-style doublings—also merge and mutate. Patterns pop up in still lifes. Mirrored imagery appears in patterns. And all manner of doubling—and doubling-back—occurs just about everywhere, creating a body of work that is impossible to divide into tidy, hard-and-fast categories or cut-and-dried subsets. That, in a sense, is the point of everything Dowell does: to get us to see connections between and among seemingly disparate things; to discover relationships between and among otherwise unrecognizable or unnameable things; and to find ourselves in the midst of it all, searching and seeking and finding pleasure and meaning on our own terms, over and over again. Although you know that there’s no such thing as Visionary Realism, Dowell makes you feel that such antithetical approaches to art making may not be such strange bedfellows after all, especially in the hands of an artist whose works are so adept at defying expectations and getting us to see things we’ve never seen.

David Pagel is an art critic, curator, and professor of art theory and history at Claremont Graduate University. His reviews and essays have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Brooklyn Rail, Artforum, Art issues., Flash Art, and Art in America. Recent publications include Jim Shaw, Lund Humphries, London, 2019 and Talking Beauty: A Conversation Between Joseph Raffael and David Pagel about Art, Love, Death, and Creativity, Zero+, Claremont, 2018, as well as monographs on Ted Larsen (Radius Books) and Augustine Kofie (Zero+), and catalog essays on Jay DeFeo, Brenda Goodman, Gajin Fujita, and Dion Johnson. Recent exhibitions Pagel organized include “Brown Letham: Passion and Paradox (and a little night music),” and “tbd: Jay Erker, Tony Larson, John Mills, Holly Perez, Marissa Reyes, and Jenny Ziomek.” Pagel is currently working on a book on John Sonsini, scheduled to be published in 2024. A self-taught diorama builder and an avid cyclist, Pagel is a seven-time winner of the California Triple Crown.

untitled #1210, 2022