We are delighted to announce Toronto artist Howard Lonn’s first solo presentation with the gallery. ‘Khrome’ features a body of new paintings created this year. 

“In this group of paintings I feel as if I have been distantly, inaccurately remembering fragments of someone else's last century modernity. Not the one offered on the first Google search or the one repackaged for easy twenty-first century consumption. Khrome is colour, from the Greek. It also denotes a reflective, mirror-like metallic plating. Some of my previous work has been described as architectural. The forms deployed in this group of new paintings possess an architectonic sense of scale and structure; however, they are freed of the burden of giving us an architectural image. 

For the most part these paintings elude a pictorially definite resolution into an identifiable ‘thing’. I, like any viewer, look into an image with the initial aim of recognition. I find pleasure in the act of looking, so I suspect that I have attenuated the payoff that comes with identification to provide more room for seeing, for conjecture. As Ihor Holubizky wrote in his essay Howard Lonn: Signals Back the World (2012): “In the end a structure necessary for his painting appears, and makes it knowable, yet not to describe, but to propose.” 

I see painting itself as a kind of membrane across which my experience and thoughts are carried and transmitted back to the world, as a compressed, encoded signal for interpretation, which ultimately reaches its completion through the experience of viewing.” 

- Howard Lonn