HOWARD DYKE ‘SENSE MANIAC ‘

23rd June – 14th July 2010
Private View 22nd June 6.00 – 8.30pm
Press Reception 4pm

Howard Dyke’s gestural, painterly brushwork is expressive, emotive, evocative. As his brush strokes form folds, lines drips of colour. A fold maybe just a fold, but it also satisfyingly sculptural and, in Dyke’s work, a formalised element on the verge of abstraction – it enables the paint to swathe, cloak, array and adorn the canvas. but then in a willful destruction or of destructive curiosity, like a child taking apart a machine to see how it works, he dismantles his own gesture, cutting it up to be remade, re-formalised, reconstituted as layering and juxtaposition, the subject fragmented, meaning disrupted.
Dyke destroys gesture and collapses the figure/ground dialectic. He takes apart his open expressionist gesture in order to examine it from a new view-point, rearranging, turning it around to see how it works, or to continue it. The folds become cut, the seams proliferate; the working method is still quick, loose and impulsive, but scissors have, for now, replaced the paintbrush; the scissors of a Tailor, a Collagist, a Montagist, creating new forms, mantles and relationships; assembling s