The dot is a fitting emblem of the conviviality animating Leaking Logic, a collaborative exhibition of works by the Tiohti\u00e1:ke\/Montr\u00e9al-based artists Surabhi Ghosh and Patrick Howlett. Unlike the divisive enclosures of the Modernist grid, there is something boundless about the dot, whose circumference can evoke widely divergent scales of reference\u2014from the cellular to the planetary. Freely circulating across Ghosh\u2019s elegant fibre-based installations and Howlett\u2019s intricate egg-tempera panels, the effervescent geometry of this figure conjures a fertile cross-pollination of ideas and material processes.<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
This dialogism is most explicit in Fruit Tree <\/em>(2023), the only work in the show co-created by the two artists. Following a fallow period during the pandemic, Howlett was inspired to return to the studio by Ghosh\u2019s gift of test silkscreens, whose patterned spots he dutifully annotated in watercolour and gouache with a colourful array of smaller circles. Patiently stitched together, these painted fields of recycled pantleg recall the interactions of elementary particles or, occasionally, the caput mortuum<\/em> of alchemical symbolism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Hermetic imagery is familiar territory for Howlett, whose past bodies of work have limned transcendental practices and ritual diagrams. His contributions to Leaking Logic <\/em>extend the concerns of more recent series, however, in which intangible realms of the spirit give way to \u201chumoral\u201d theories of health and temperament that shaped understandings of the body from antiquity through the Renaissance. Derived from the Greek word for sap or juice (chymos<\/em>), humoral medicine was premised on the belief that physical and mental health are regulated by a shifting balance of four fundamental bodily fluids.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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