Howard Dyke. New Emperors

About

Howard Dyke's new paintings come from the total immersion that is the artist's studio. Figures emerge after long observation, figures which are themselves constructed, collaged after long reflection from the painted materials strewn around him. As with all collage, each element's origins are readable as from 'elsewhere' but here as painted fragments, their sources are the previous acts of the artist, conceptually re-framed from past gesture and impulse, an elsewhere in time as much as space.

The paintings we have before us are in fact palimpsests of the artist's actions, dismembered over time and re-assembled to inhabit new spaces within a new framework. It is the Frankenstein re-structuring of the figure not just within the canvas/es but within our cognitive process (simultaneously dissonant and affirmative) that puts us in constant flux before Dyke's work. The often huge scale of the work is not a question of domination but generosity, allowing the viewer at every turn a new reading, alternatives that are nevertheless always posited around a liminal figuration, a fleeting beauty.