ART : A Successful Fusion : Roy Dowell’s paintings mix seemingly unrelated visual styles, but the results are rigorous works of maturity and diversity

“I’m not trying to get out of the question,” Roy Dowell said the other day. “I just don’t really remember.”

What the artist could not quite recall was exactly how, as a student at the California Institute of the Arts in the early 1970s, he defended his decision to abandon video as his principal medium in exchange for plain, old-fashioned painting. Vigorously defending your artistic positions has become something of a trademark for the pedagogical style at the school, especially when those positions are seen as out of step with the vanguard.

Dowell originally had come to video, and to a secondary pursuit of performance art, after two years of studying photography at Oakland’s College of Arts and Crafts. As a visual language, painting was then routinely being claimed to be as dead as Latin, and CalArts was becoming known as an adventurous, cross-disciplinary school where experiment in new mediums was encouraged. Dowell had set off in that direction, working principally with Conceptual and performance artist Allan Kaprow; but, somewhere along the way, he took a sharp detour.

In reality, Dowell explained, the school was never as repressive as legend now has it--at least, not in the years he was a student. (Dowell received his BFA in 1973, and his MFA two years later.) “Paul Brach didn’t really care what you were doing, as long as you were serious about it,” said Dowell of the founding dean of the visual arts school. “What I think I got out of CalArts was more personal growth than artistic growth. It taught me to stand up for what I believe in--whether vocally or in my work. When I decided that what I really wanted to do was paint, it didn’t matter whether it was ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ or whether people would accept it or not.”

That education has stood the artist in good stead. At a time when painting--especially abstract painting--has, once again, begun to seem enervated and wan, eclipsed by other forms, Dowell’s has taken off. Occasionally, a gallery exhibition stands out as a sign post in an artist’s career. Dowell’s current exhibition at Rosamund Felsen Gallery, which continues through Saturday, is that kind of show.

The 29 paintings, collages and monotypes contain features that are new to the artist’s work, including an iconographic coherence and a fluent variety of scale not evident before. More important, though, this complex body of rigorous work feels confident and self-assured, with no false steps.

It has been a long time coming. Dowell graduated from CalArts in 1975. Not until 1982 or ’83 did the essential elements of his mature art begin to make themselves felt, and during the remainder of the decade he tried out a variety of means. Some worked and some didn’t. Overall, something seemed held back.

A spur may have come from a survey of his paintings from the decade, mounted in 1989 at the gallery of the Otis Art Institute, where Dowell is today chairman of the graduate studies department. A survey exhibition offers an artist a brief timeout, an opportunity to reflect on his own development. Dowell’s survey was followed by an ambitious, somewhat uneven, but critically well-received exhibition at Felsen Gallery the following year. Now, a year later, everything has coalesced. His current show is among the strongest to have been seen in the galleries this season.

Oddly enough, Dowell’s early interest in photography and video art is reflected in a fundamental aspect of his painting. His exuberant pictures are concatenations of seemingly contradictory and unrelated visual styles, most drawn from the existing lexicon of modern abstraction. The pictorial syntax is Cubist and Futurist and Suprematist and Constructivist and Surrealist and Abstract Expressionist, all at once. Like a camera, which privileges virtually anything that passes in front of its lens, he democratizes existing cultural vision.

“Everything I see, everything that occurs to me is of equal value,” Dowell explained, “so there’s not a feeling that only certain sources are of worth. I’ll pull from anything. That’s one of the reasons I started to use collage (in the paintings). Paint allowed a unified surface, no matter how many different styles I tried to paint in at the same time. I wanted diversity, an irregularity of surface and of mark, to help bolster the ideas behind the painting.”

Adding elements of collage--advertisements torn from billboards, bits of prints he makes himself, even pieces of wood--amid the painted areas keeps the clamoring diversity alive. The multiplicity of materials matches the multiplicity in pictorial syntax.

Dowell says the photographs he made as a student in Oakland were themselves like collages, and his descriptions of his early CalArts videotapes and performances likewise ring a bell as ancestors to his painting. “I made very tight compositions of found objects that were pulled together and photographed,” he remembered. “The videos were pretty corny, even downright stupid, based on plays on words--like ‘palm tree,’ where the image of a tree would be made out of the palms of the hands of a group of people.

“I also did some pieces with musical systems instigated by everyday activities. I would give a musician a set of rules, rather than sheet music. He was positioned in a hallway, and if someone walked by and maybe scratched their nose, that would be a sign for him to play a certain kind of clarinet passage. Or if somebody scratched their head, or walked fast or walked slow, these things would send messages to the musician. People would slowly begin to understand that he was responding to them in some way, so they would start to manipulate him--to conduct a concert with

the musician.”

Today, sophisticated echoes of these youthful exploits reverberate through Dowell’s paintings. The found objects in his photographs and the “found scores” of his musical systems turn up as the billboard fragments and other collage elements he employs, as well as being mirrored in the range of established artistic styles he pulls together. Sly visual puns are made, too, as in one diagrammatic form that recalls the machine-like imagery in the Dadaist art of Marcel Duchamp or Francis Picabia; in Dowell’s painting, it visually clamps together six different parts of a composition. Dada’s wryly “useless” machinery is put to visually useful work.

Space in Dowell’s paintings is typically shallow, compressed, pushed forward. Small hints of deep space turn up here and there, but principally they serve to make the rest of the visual imagery seem even more upfront and insistent. His pictures feel chock-a-block full, a ripe and flavorful abundance held in dynamic equilibrium.

The feeling of abundance is underscored by the artist’s prominent use of fragmentary billboard pictures of food. Big ripe tomatoes, a fan of what appear to be sliced beets and huge, glistening olives populate the paintings. Sometimes, because of the cropping, you can’t quite make out exactly what kind of food it is--in one painting, areas of assorted yellow-orange hue turn out to have been taken from a picture of different cheeses--but the fragments nonetheless exude an aura of sustenance. The similarity in scale between the food and its densely painted abstract context emphasizes the screen-pattern with which the billboard picture was mechanically printed; though figurative, the picture thus seems abstract.

“I’m not trying to say that olives are a stand-in for some philosophical idea,” Dowell said. “I chose them because I liked the color of them, or the form. They’re just this visually interesting thing, which works in this particular composition. I choose things like olives because of certain general references they might have, and because of the formal qualities they have, equally. One informs the other.”

The olive picture (all Dowell’s new paintings are untitled) features a 2-foot tall pair of sparkling green olives, with painted tassels dangling from their bright pimentos, bouncing through an overstuffed pictorial field. Their arc, which Dowell has emphasized with painted shapes beneath them, creates a rocket-like illusion of being launched through space. An exuberant party atmosphere engulfs the picture--which is no mean feat for what is, after all, an abstract painting.

This celebratory aura is a principal leitmotif of Dowell’s show, and the festivity is further enhanced by a recurrent suggestion of the image of a key: In one, the key is a shadow-like form of positive and negative shapes; in another, it’s a suggestive squiggle of lines; in a third, it’s a billboard fragment of a can opener. An instrument granting access, the chimerical key inevitably alludes to liberating questions of freedom amid the diversity.

The printed paper scraps in Dowell’s paintings come from a variety of sources. He picks up scraps that have blown off billboards after the rain, or tears bits of posters off walls during travels in Italy and Mexico. Friends, knowing the nature of his work, regularly bring him tattered offerings.

The current group of paintings benefited from a windfall: A local billboard company gave him a stack of large, unused billboard sheets. Their size was substantially greater than the scraps Dowell had been scavenging, so he began to work on a larger scale.

Regardless of the size, the internal logic directing the scale of each picture is independent. That’s why one otherwise unusual feature of the installation seems perfectly appropriate: Two tiny paintings, each just 14 inches high and 10 inches wide, can hang next to a panel more than 5 1/2 feet high and 4 feet wide, yet still command space on the wall.

“It has become necessary for me, because I’m changing, to be more insistent about the ideas in the paintings,” the 40-year-old artist observed, “and that seemed to require that they get larger. (But) I didn’t ever want people to approach the paintings thinking the large works were the important paintings and the small ones were the minor works, because that’s not how I view them. In fact, the small pieces on paper often take longer to make than the large paintings.”

Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of Dowell’s art is its subtle yet resonant relationship to an often maligned genre: colonial painting, in which the aesthetic tastes of a dominant foreign culture have been overlaid onto and mingled into indigenous forms of expression. Typically, colonial art is less highly regarded than the work produced “at home” by the more powerful, colonizing culture. Attributes of authenticity, originality, purity and uniqueness are denied to the art of the colonized land, which is dismissed as merely derivative and provincial.

Dowell turns such distinctions on their head. Ever since the advent of Cubist painting early in this century, in which multiple perspectives on a single scene collide, formal concepts of multiplicity and simultaneity have been fundamental to art--so fundamental as to have described an essential aspect of modern life. In a sense, however, colonial experience is also marked by multiplicity and simultaneity, albeit of a cultural, rather than perceptual, kind. This is the arena Dowell’s paintings have begun to open up.

Dowell and his partner, the painter Lari Pittman, have long collected Spanish Colonial and Mexican folk art, especially devotional retablos of Catholic saints and ex votos made by peasants in gratitude for miracles delivered. Direct references to such art were prominent in paintings he made in 1989, such as “Passion Play” and “Annunciation,” and visual fragments remain in his newest work. The theatrical tassles on the bouncing olives, for instance, have been copied from the decorative background drapery on a 19th-Century retablo of St. Joseph.

Likewise, Dowell also has a special fondness for the paintings of early 20th-Century American modernists--Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, Raymond Jonson--in which a distinctly American experience was being articulated in the language of newly evolving European abstraction. And although he admires a variety of mainstream art, he’s particularly attracted to its reverberations at the margins.

Indeed, when he first began to paint at CalArts, he made simple still lifes in the style of Mexican folk art. “They weren’t very honest paintings,” the artist recalled of this student work, “in that I was trying to make them look very much less educated than I actually was, more naive.” In retrospect, it seems as if Dowell was in fact attempting to “unlearn,” or go around, established modernist tradition.

As an inheritor of that tradition, of course, no such detour was possible. So Dowell has chosen instead to drive straight through its middle, piling one established motif and style atop another, regardless of its pedigree or point of origin. The result is an exuberant cacophony of competing voices that, without sacrifice to a singular harmony, miraculously holds together.