Marinaro Gallery is pleased to present Ridley Howard’s first solo exhibition at the gallery.
Howard’s recent paintings depict imagined people and events in (mostly) fictional places. They are portrayed with the subtlety and specific knowledge of a memory, but carry the familiarity of common or borrowed imagery. With a hint of the surreal, the paintings hinge on Howard’s sense of color, light, tone, design and touch. Characters and location hold key roles, playing with notions of time, drift, and travel.
The locations of the figures in Howard’s work are mysterious. There are flattened and finely tuned areas of color, a distillation that pushes reality into a dream or movie poster. Rendered areas of landscape or interiors anchor his protagonists, interspersed with movements towards collage and emptied spaces. These Bauhaus-inspired, abstracted spaces create areas of dislocated experience in the paintings.
In several paintings, Howard reintroduces the landscape to his work. The scenes are reminiscent of incidental tourist photos, the kind you take and then don’t show your friends. Floating in each one is a face of a woman, kissing couples or a pair of high-heeled feet. The landscapes, empty, are the spaces of memory. In another painting, two women stand in front of a mural at a local Italian restaurant. Their romantic dinner, having occurred in one place, is transported to the Italian coast. Above their heads is either the name of the restaurant or a welcome sign: “Benvenuti/e” and the Italian flag, disrupting the mirage of their trip.
Overall, there is an intimacy to Howard’s paintings, regardless of size. The softness of the edges and the stillness of the images are introspective. In this way, they have something in common with film. There is a feeling of time slowed down and memorialized. Howard’s works can feel wistful and romantic. Sometimes tinged with humor, they can also be distant and cool, a device that allows the paintings to be unsentimental in their relationship to love, place, memory, and time.
Ridley Howard (b. 1973, Atlanta, GA) earned his MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston in 1999 and his BFA in Painting from the University of Georgia in 1996. He attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2000. His work has been exhibited at numerous institutions including: the Museum of Fine Arts Boston; The Atlanta Contemporary; the Savannah College of Art and Design, Atlanta and Savannah, GA; the National Academy Museum, New York; the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; and the Knoxville Museum of Art, Knoxville, TN. Howard currently lives and works between Athens, GA and Brooklyn, NY.