Contributed by Amanda Church / In his exhibition of similarly sized small-scale paintings titled “Sky,” now up at Marinaro, Ridley Howard applies his usual paint-handling panache to celestial expanses of blue. The surfaces are flawless and smooth, as are the porcelain faces of the women he depicts. The skies’ shades vary, and clouds make an occasional appearance, but there’s a pervasive sense of clarity and tranquility punctuated by partial views of treetops, cocktails, and impassive female faces. The usually stark tableaux sometimes border on the surreal. Howard’s Summer Moon, for instance, echoes Magritte’s The Banquet, minus the figure.
Clear blue sky offers an ideally placid backdrop for an almost robotic gaze into nowhere. The single blue eye in Cocktail Red Border fixes a stony stare into the distance, ignoring the proffered pink cocktail despite its perfect red circle of a cherry perched improbably on the glass’s edge, while the dark eye in Old Fashioned seems more contemplative. In Sky Blue Sunglasses, the figure looks boxed in by bordering bands of blue, the white triangle of her outfit completing the painting’s pristine geometry.
Howard’s paintings have a sort of muted eroticism, differing from those of Pop predecessors like Tom Wesselmann in his “Great American Nude” series from the 1960s and John Wesley – another lover of pastel blue – with his stylized sexuality. They have more in common with the pared-down portraiture of Will Barnet. Consider, for example, Barnet’s impeccably composed, intensely geometric 1967 painting of Ruth Bowman. Howard has long been investigating how figuration and abstraction can interact, and “Sky” continues that exploration with perhaps more subtlety than in his previous forays. The two exceptions are Pink Red and Sun Lovers, in which the introduction of red feels almost jarring in an otherwise imperturbable context. The rest of the paintings seamlessly meld the affect of the fragmented figures with the precision of their compositions.
“Ridley Howard: Sky,” Marinaro, 678 Broadway, Floor 3, New York, NY. Through June 28, 2025.
About the author: Amanda Church is a painter and occasional writer living and working in New York City, where she is represented by High Noon Gallery. Eyelash, her favorite among the paintings she made in 2023, is included in the New York Studio School’s summer show of Mercedes Matter Award winners.
