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ROY DOWELL

511 West 22nd Street

515 West 22nd Street

525 West 22nd Street

520 West 21st Street

New York NY 10011

AN INVENTORY OF DESIRE On Roy Dowell’s Evidence to the Contrary Geun-jun Chungwoo-Michael Lim Roy Dowell has confessed to a recurring worry: that his solo exhibitions might read as group shows. Stand at the threshold of this one, and you will see what he means. Twenty-five paintings share a single format — vinyl emulsion on linen over panel, twenty-four by eighteen inches — and, with a handful of exceptions, inventory numbers in place of titles. Within that discipline, nothing repeats. Five black discs in a pale dotted field, a thicket of thorned line winding around a mosaic cross, two checkered ovals ringed in yellow. No signature look binds them because Dowell refuses seriality on principle: Each painting is built as an independent proposition, and what he trusts to unify his paintings is nothing visible at all — only, as he puts it, his intention. His worry, in other words, is our instruction. The first impression of dispersal is not a misreading to be corrected but the intended entrance. And it defines what an essay can honestly do here. Dowell states that decoding, deciphering, and deconstructing the work is the viewer’s labor; that whatever more a viewer finds is the viewer’s own achievement; that there is no finish line and no correct answer. He withholds titles for the same reason — not coyness, but a refusal to steer. A critic who “solves” these paintings is stealing on the viewer’s behalf. What follows is instead a way of looking: four habits to switch off or on before the walls, in the order the exhibition itself teaches them. First, stop looking for a hierarchy Western pictures train us to triage: figure against ground, center against margin, subject against ornament. Bring that habit to a Dowell panel and it spins without traction. Take untitled #1276 (2024) — five black discs, two black L-forms, a frame of red-and-green striped blocks around a cream field. Which element is the image, and which is the decoration? Is the striped border a frame for the discs, or are the discs punctuation inside a striped picture? The question stalls, and the stalling is the point: No element outranks another, and none surrenders.

Dowell has a name for this condition, and it is borrowed from an unlikely ancestor. Edward Hicks was a Quaker preacher in early-nineteenth-century Pennsylvania who paid his bills as a sign and coach painter — lettering, borders, ornament — and who, for the last three decades of his life, painted one biblical scene over and over: Isaiah’s prophecy of the predator lying down with the prey, the wolf with the lamb, the leopard with the kid, and a child leading them. Sixty-two versions survive, each done in the flat, frontal manner of the sign trade, many with William Penn signing his treaty with the Lenape in the background — peace between species in front, peace between peoples behind. Hicks called the subject the “peaceable kingdom,” and Dowell has taken the phrase for his own studio law: Every new form entering his vocabulary, he says, must find its place within a peaceable kingdom. The borrowed phrase names both a source and a politics of form. Modernist collage, from its Cubist founding, staged the meeting of unlike things as collision — shock, rupture, dialectical charge. Dowell, for whom collage is less a technique than an epistemology (it is, he says, how he sees the world and how he thinks), stages it as cohabitation: a basket-weave lattice, a modernist grid, a folk-ceramic glyph, and a scrap of signage holding adjacent ground without rank. Read the painting, then, not by finding its subject but by tracking its treaties — which patterns touch, which colors mediate, where a border consents to be crossed. Second, read the surface as presence, not as past The second habit concerns time, and it requires staying longer than a scan. Dowell begins with no preparatory drawings and only the vaguest of ideas. The work happens, he says, as a conversation between painter and panel, and a painting’s origins are routinely buried in its own process. Notice, though, what his medium does to that burial. Thinned vinyl emulsion dries matte and semi-translucent, so earlier decisions stay legible beneath later ones. Consider how unusual that is. In the Renaissance order of picture-making, the idea preceded the hand, the drawing preceded the color, and the finished surface was designed to entomb its own preparation. When the Arno River flooded Florence in November 1966 and restorers had to strip ruined frescoes from church walls, what emerged beneath them were the sinopie — the red-earth underdrawings, hidden for five centuries. It took a catastrophe to make the preparation visible again. Dowell paints as if that entire order had been quietly retired: His surfaces cover without entombing, keeping the preparatory intelligence of the hand permanently in view, no flood required.

And this is why the archaic passages in his panels — the frontal symmetry of a votive object, the punched repetition of a stamped textile — do not read as excavated. Painting has renewed itself through antiquity before, and the relay is worth spelling out. Peter Paul Rubens and Nicolas Poussin, in the seventeenth century, drew from Roman ruins and ancient sculpture to rebuild painting from the ground up. Two centuries later, Paul Cézanne rerouted through both of them on his way to the great unfinished Large Bathers (1900–1906). Henri Matisse then reached past antiquity altogether toward the cave painters in Le Bonheur de vivre (1905–06), and Pablo Picasso answered him within the year with Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907). But that whole relay ran through Europe’s own basement, and it ran on reverence — each generation approaching the old forms as authority. Dowell’s route bypasses the Mediterranean entirely, and its tense is different. Nothing here arrives from the past. The ancient is summoned to the present and set running. Each panel is a pocket Mnemosyne atlas, kept switched on rather than archived.1 Not excavation but invocation; not survival but reactivation. The distance between then, now, and next does not shorten on these panels; it fails to exist. Even Dowell’s American lineage obeys this tense. He builds emblematic, frontal fields in the tradition of Marsden Hartley and Arthur Dove — the early moderns who trusted a flag, a mountain, a leaf-form to carry feeling without narrative. But where those founders painted toward the spirit, Dowell states his position without hedging: He does not aim to reside in the spiritual, and he admits its imagery only insofar as it is simultaneously secular. Citation without faith — yet nothing about it is taxidermy, and the reason is the engine this essay keeps circling: He brings the old forms in not because he reveres them but because he wants them, and desire conjugates everything it touches in the present tense. Third, read the motifs as belongings Before turning eighteen, Dowell had moved some sixteen times. One thing traveled anyway: making ran in the female line — grandmother, great-aunt, mother, cousin: four of them, across three generations, trained at the same California art school — so place could not be inherited, but the habit of the hand was. A painter raised inside a single vernacular inherits it; raised inside none, he must choose his ancestors. Dowell chose two, and both sit outside the academy’s bloodline: the homegrown American moderns — Hicks the sign-painter, Hartley, Dove — and the deep arts of Mexico, beside which he

literally lives, dividing his time between Los Angeles and Mexico City. An elective inheritance of traditions that were themselves never inherited from Europe.

The choosing was learned early and against the grain. Trained at CalArts under Allan Kaprow, at the citadel of an art whose idea was to precede and command execution, he defected there to the handmade object — his painting post-conceptual from its first stroke, its standard of completion a strict, indefinable sense of “rightness” felt as a nerve being touched: an exacting rule with no rulebook. The collection came with the defection. The ceramics, masks, and carved figures that fill the home he shares with the artist Lari Pittman — his partner since their CalArts years, fifty-two years now — are, he says plainly, autobiography: We reveal who we are by what we surround ourselves with. He calls them his objects of virtue, and adds that the virtue is defined by his own lights and nobody else’s — a sovereignty asserted, not argued. Then the sentence that unlocks the panels: Sometimes, knowing he can never physically possess an object he has seen, he paints it — because by using and commemorating it in the work, he can have it. Description as ownership; each panel a ledger of the unpossessable. That maneuver — possessing by depicting — has a queer American pedigree, and it is worth walking through slowly, because Dowell descends from it. Call it the salon lineage. It begins with Gertrude Stein, the American writer who settled in Paris and, with her brother Leo, spent a modest inheritance buying Cézannes, Matisses, and Picassos before almost anyone else wanted them. Her apartment at 27 rue de Fleurus, its walls packed with the collection, became the Saturday salon where young American modernists learned what the new art looked like. Stein’s own art was made of words: her “word portraits” rendered friends — Picasso and Matisse among them — with no likeness at all, only the rhythm and repetition of language, a portrait you could not see but could not mistake. And when she finally wrote her memoir, she wrote it as The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas — her own life told through the person she loved. Collecting as self-portrait; possession by description: The grammar was hers first.

The painters took it up. Charles Demuth, a Pennsylvania precisionist and a friend of Stein’s circle, built a series of “poster portraits” of the people he loved and admired — portraits made not of faces but of letters, numbers, and emblems. The most famous, I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold (1928), condenses his friend William Carlos Williams into the poem Williams wrote about a fire engine flashing through the rainy night — a gold 5 blazing three times out of the dark, the poet present only as “BILL” and “CARLO[S]” in fragments of signage. A person, held entirely in cipher. Marsden Hartley then carried the method into grief. In Berlin, he had loved a young Prussian officer, Karl von Freyburg, who was killed in October 1914, at age twenty-four, early in the First World War. Hartley could not name that love publicly, so he painted it: Portrait of a German Officer (1914) assembles the initials K.v.F., the number 24, the regiment’s 4, epaulettes, spurs, the Iron Cross — a man rebuilt as an arrangement of insignia, mourning encrypted as pattern. To possess by commemorating; to hold the unsayable in cipher. And the lineage kept renewing itself, self-consciously. Robert Indiana — who was born Robert Clark, who was adopted as an infant and raised in Depression-era Indiana, and who moved twenty-one times before he turned seventeen — traced his lifelong obsession with numbers and letters to precisely that instability: A child who kept losing addresses learned to hold onto the signs. Indiana discovered Stein when he was an art student through a recording of her opera Four Saints in Three Acts. He called himself “an American painter of signs,” and in 1963 he painted The Demuth American Dream No. 5. It was Demuth’s golden 5 reset in Indiana’s own hard-edge language: one painter in the lineage repainting another, inheritance performed in public. Displacement into signs; signs into belongings — the pattern that opens this section, run twice. Dowell, who allows that the idea of a sigil — a desire encoded past recognition — interests him, descends from this school and extends it. Where Stein possessed by describing and Hartley by commemorating, Dowell paints the objects he cannot own, and owns them. Fourth, walk it as a street of windows The ledger has a second, humbler genealogy, and it supplies the last habit. If there is a suburban avant-garde of the shopping mall, there is an older American avant-garde of the shop window — and

it, too, comes with names and dates. Frederick Kiesler, the Viennese visionary designer transplanted to New York, published Contemporary Art Applied to the Store and Its Display in 1930, arguing that the department-store window was a laboratory where advanced art could meet the street. Salvador Dalí tested the proposition in 1939: He was commissioned to dress two windows at Bonwit Teller on Fifth Avenue and found his tableau altered by the store. He climbed into the display to overturn a fur-lined bathtub and crashed with it through the plate glass — an arrest, a headline, and proof of how seriously a window could be meant. In the mid-1950s, two unknown painters named Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg earned their living building windows for Tiffany and Bonwit Teller under a shared pseudonym, “Matson Jones” — a false name adopted precisely to keep their commercial craft from touching their artistic reputations. The alias is the tell: Display work was a trade one did but did not sign, for decades a discreet harbor for gay men who banked their aesthetics in ornament — a workshop of ensembles built to make the unowned wanted, run by men trained in wanting what could not be said. 8

Dowell’s panels are that school’s direct descendants, with one revision that changes everything: The merchandise has been deposed. Window dressing with nothing for sale; seduction with no transaction to close. What Dowell calls decorating an idea — making it more persuasive, better able to draw the viewer in and seduce — is the window dresser’s art promoted to the condition of painting. The fate of the lineage’s most famous image shows what is at stake in that revision. Robert Indiana’s LOVE — four letters first devised in 1964 and adopted for a Museum of Modern Art Christmas card in 1965 — escaped him: It was never copyrighted, it was endlessly reproduced, and the most intimate of his coded works was converted into the century’s most exhausted commodity. In Dowell’s windows there is nothing the market can carry off, because nothing is for sale. And where the museum vitrine manufactures temporal distance — do not touch; this belongs to then — the shop window promises its abolition: Soon this could be yours. Dowell displays the deep past in the window’s tense, not the vitrine’s. The peaceable kingdom, read from this side, is simply the shop window after the commodity has abdicated. So take the habit literally on your way through: walk the room as a street of windows, display to display, unhurried, wanting — and notice that nothing here asks to be bought.

Return The exhibition’s last lesson arrives on the way out, when the twenty-five propositions begin talking to one another — an echoed disc, a shared palette — and the group show resolves into a single, plural self-portrait. Lately, Dowell has taken to quoting himself, revisiting motifs from his earlier work. His own past has entered the collection, one more vernacular among the others. As Indiana once repainted Demuth, Dowell now repaints Dowell, which means the present paintings are already patterns for paintings to come. The inventory stays open at both ends. Nor did the transmission stay inward. For twenty-six years, Dowell built and chaired the graduate fine-arts program at Otis College of Art and Design — modeled, he says, on the best of CalArts and on what CalArts lacked; the school he had wished for, constructed and then handed on — insisting throughout that he was of no use to students unless he remained a working artist. A man who could not inherit a lineage spent a quarter of a century being one. Evidence to the Contrary, then — contrary to what? To the reflexive oppositions this work quietly retires: that decoration excludes intelligence, that seduction excludes rigor, that a conceptual education forecloses the handmade, that a shop window cannot be a school, that twenty-five stubborn singularities cannot amount to one autobiography. Dowell files his numbered exhibits and attaches no verdict. He cites a fellow painter, Charline von Heyl, and her hope for painting that stays ahead of the sentence, carrying the viewer past definitions to the place where looking feels like thinking. These four habits are only a map to that place. The paintings are the territory, and the verdict — as the artist insists — is yours. Note 1. The reference is to Aby Warburg’s unfinished Bilderatlas Mnemosyne (1924–29), which mounted images across widely separated epochs on black panels, so that a gesture from antiquity might be found surviving, transformed, in a Renaissance painting or a contemporary photograph — what Warburg called Nachleben, the afterlife of the antique. Dowell’s panels invite the comparison because each compresses that cross-temporal juxtaposition into a single surface rather than a wall of plates. But the borrowing is also a correction: Warburg’s atlas maps survival, the persistence of a form as trace; Dowell’s paintings stage reactivation, the archaic switched on in the present tense. Where the atlas archives, the panel runs.

untitled #1273, 2024 Vinyl emulsion on linen over panel 24 x 18 inches 61 x 46 cm

untitled #1274, 2024