The Brooklyn Rail

Aaron Fowler’s RELEASE at Anton Kern Gallery clarifies the motivation that underlies the artist’s inveterate use of materials. The current exhibition shows us that the car bumpers the artist has been working with over the last several years relate to a ritual practiced by the Fowler family of releasing balloons after a loved one passes. The reality expressed within this acceptance of loss contextualizes Fowler’s practice through the specific valence of memorial, compressing remembrance into compacted form. The salvaged materials that Fowler reconditions have always been intertwined with bodies, suggesting that within the beautiful wreckage and debris our bodies are material aide-memoires, reaching for what can no longer be accessed.

Fowler is a painter who paints in scrap and salvage and whatever is expelled from within the city. He is adept in the languages of Dada that Noah Purifoy and Raymond Saunders also work within and is similarly able to find the miraculous within the heap that is left out on the curb. His works feel cinematic without the electricity, like they are offline machines. They are physical and non-virtual, but nonetheless, they depict and retain a network of information. Family Release (2025) spans most of the wall of Anton Kern’s upper gallery. It is a physical archive, or a concept of painting as a form of detritus fresco, that generates and networks multiple moments. It desires all the space it can get, reaching past the limit of painting to go for an environmental effect like Karen Kilimnik or James Rosenquist or Jim Dine also desired.

The theme of the family ritual gets sublimated into seatbelts, chipboard, and the weave of synthetic hair. It invites both a traditional, linear way of seeing painting and also a materialist one. Cross-talk is implied through the layering of language. At times the material seems chosen for its own inherent virtuosity, and at others it's more about its speed—done with a kind of pragmatism that is needed to delineate space and impact our memory like a community mural. There are syllogisms within Fowler’s process: the repurposed materials are used to recover those who have passed. The synthetic colors of Fowler’s bumpers have the same phthalo and quinacridone pigments used in airbrushed memorial T-shirts, providing a speed of color and material that effectively balances the bulwark of discard that forms the work. In the few places that are traditionally painted, Fowler works the form quickly before overloading it with thick, gelatinous medium, which crazes and folds as it feels the weight of gravity—getting it down quick, as it is, in hopes that it will remain permanent in our memory after we see it.

The balloon release externalizes our sense of loss into a desperately hopeful object, and Fowler does the same in his own way. CMac (2025) monumentalizes the artist’s stepfather. Started just a few days after he was gone, the artist has flipped a hot tub cover vertically, scaling the abyss of bereavement as an act of tribute. The loss of Fowler’s stepfather spills into the rest of the room through shattered bumpers that take on the lightness of released balloons, forming the syntax of wreckage and loss. The bumper-singer-shouters are cherubim with open mouths, watching over or singing down to us. It’s a beautiful but absurd reality, like the stasima of tragedy or the over-enriched depth of bathos in an Ari Aster film. The fragments frame more poignant moments with necessary absurdity, like polyphonic Virgils bearing witness to our pain and tragedy. Fowler also takes great care to depict the material that is left behind by those that have passed, referencing their employment and their relationships. Fowler makes us aware of the social economy at work around us, and the way it extrudes itself into the larger definitions of our lives.

The trauma of loss has led Fowler into developing painting into a form of memoryware. Form is wrecked down, salvaged down, and then built back up. Among other things, Fowler’s exhibition is memorable for its ability to avoid potential pitfalls. It avoids both valorizing itself or indulging in escapism, and somehow it also sidesteps the cloying and saccharine. It is difficult representing those who were and are in such close proximity to us. There isn’t world-building here, but instead a transformation of biography into representational matter and form. This is made possible by Fowler’s engagement with material and by what its ambition offers to the language of painting. Family Release is an important idea about painting in a time when there seem to be few of them left. The body merges with the object of its destruction as Fowler asks what remains in us as we move through the cyphered logic of trauma and loss. Similarly, in the title of the work I’m Okay…But I'm Not Okay…But I know Everything Is Gonna Be Okay… (Tyrese Balloon Release) (2025), Fowler establishes that there is an infinite loop of recovery and acceptance bound up within loss and suffering. We are entangled in our trauma like all of Fowler’s slack seatbelts, merging with the pain of what has been endured. But we survive it. Our survival of loss forms its own Elysian inertia. Joy is earned, in this case through seatbelts and shattered headlights and the release of balloons into the clouds above the park.