Patrick Howlett’s enigmatic paintings investigate the indeterminate nature of meaning in abstraction. His works are derived from a long process of transformations of images and text, a strategy that obfuscates a certain position of meaning while elaborating another.
“ The possible relation of title to image is an indeterminate one that plays one role in the creation my work and another in the experience of it. In some ways I use it as a cornerstone, in other ways it is a guide and a link and in another way it is meaningless. Having a title might create awareness of the gap between meaning and thing or intellect and intuition while at the same time create connections. If there is a strain, perhaps it can function as an antidote to the abstraction that takes place through language all the time. ”
— Patrick Howlett