In his ambitious West Coast debut, Will Fowler excavates modern painting's history in order to reinvent its future. A tall order to be sure, but Fowler manages to transform a familiar visual syntax—stripes, squiggles, collage, unmixed color, all-over composition—into a complex and unexpected language. In an untitled diptych (all works 2004), colored vertical stripes partially obscure collaged images of El Lissitzky's exhibition model for the 1930 International Fur Trade Exhibition. Perversely, if appropriately, the model was displayed on a tiger-skin rug. The stripes suggest a dead animal—modernism itself, perhaps—behind bars, but here and throughout the show Fowler lets Lissitzky's willful inversion of structure and decoration out of the cage. Two horizontal untitled canvases, medium and large, overwhelm the viewer with dense, all-over tangles of overlapping and abutting shapes and colors, and recall a delirious hybrid of Alfred Jensen, Stuart Davis, and kids' board games—yikes. Paradoxically, this busy, maximalist approach slows down the process of looking and rewards virtuoso viewing. Three smaller canvases—Lab, Scale Tree, and Mammoth—hint at open ground, but uncover apparent negative space as an active territory of subtle, painterly construction. Some of Fowler's more unruly tactics risk resulting in flat-footed disasters. Instead, he gets "wrong" right, and pulls the rug out from under painting's feet while leaving the medium in good standing.
Artforum.com, September 19, 2004