The Brooklyn Rail

In the 1990s, Catherine Howe was known for an idiosyncratic kind of figurative painting, with expressive brushwork, heightened color, and exaggerated forms. By the turn of the twenty-first century, the New York-based artist had shifted focus to a more abstract visual language, albeit using Dutch still-life paintings of the Golden Age as reference points and source imagery for expansive compositions made of countless layers of oil, beeswax, metal leaf, and other materials. These lyrical, free-flowing images suggest exploding still lifes of flowers in crystal vases, or piles of fruit tumbling from silver trays. A major through line in her work is a fascination with—or ardent belief in—the phenomenology of materials, particularly those specific to painting. This impetus has led her to experiment with a wide range of unorthodox mediums like carborundum grit, mica pigments, and a dazzling array of iridescent interference colors. Howe’s latest works in Mineral Spirits feature clusters of countless minute glass beads that further bolster the work’s reflective properties. In a way, the medium becomes the message as Howe strives toward a form of expression in which the painting’s elusive materiality is itself the work’s primary subject.

The directive has clearly reached full fruition in this series of recent, highly refined, opalescent painting-objects, in which each work seems to be a rarefied substance as well as a unique image. The tonality of the largest work on view, Mineral Spirits No. 5 (2024), shifts from gold, white, and pink to copper and gold again, as one moves in front of the lustrous composition. Here, biomorphic shapes and calligraphic lines appear suspended or ascending within an amorphous, otherworldly ether. Since the works are nearly impossible to photograph accurately, they demand an in-person experience and require a certain length of time for each to have its full effect on the viewer. The shimmering surface of Mineral Spirits No. 4 (2024), for example, results from an amalgam of white and rose aluminum leaf, mineral and synthetic pigments, glass beads, and acrylic on canvas. The overall effect recalls that of Mary Corse’s compositions using industrial grades of interference pigments. Howe, however, further activates the surfaces with networks of florid, curvilinear lines and botanical shapes in subtly contrasting hues, rendered with a lexicon of repeated gestures and patterns.

Two works, Mineral Spirits No. 3 (2024) and Mineral Spirits No. 13 (2024) deliver a particularly potent graphic punch with the help of black aluminum leaf applied to the stylized calligraphy. The technique allows the markings to appear as if gracefully rising above the silvery-blue grounds. With their prominent and insistent graffiti-like designs and radiant surfaces, this pair of works might be hallowed icons of some futuristic cult. Their sinuous lines and buoyant shapes appear spontaneous, though similar motifs recur throughout the show. On closer inspection, however, the obsessive layering and refined burnishing in each of these compositions reveal a tightly controlled, carefully wrought palimpsest. Mineral spirits, a common solvent used for oil-based pigments, could also refer to the alchemistic endeavor to uncover the transcendent potential and metaphysical properties of matter. In this way, the double entendre of the show’s title reflects the contradictory nature of extemporaneous image and labor-intensive process that are both attributes of Howe’s work.