The Ethics of Making: The Forming Rayons of John Heward

This exhibition of Montreal artist John Heward's work highlights an important series of paintings executed from late 1985 to early 1987. Called 'Forming', these works are all executed in color pigment on untreated (save for water, used to tighten them prior to paint application) rayon grounds. Rayon is a signature fabric of the artist's, used instead of canvas sheet because of its suppleness and receptivity to his mark-making, and because it absorbs and refracts light far more readily than canvas.  

Using various acrylic paints, primarily aquatec, Heward essayed in the Forming series a wedding between organic and geometric form, and the works are meant as a metaphor for how things do form in nature and in terms of an imposed process in the mind. The works are never presented on a stretcher, for this would only impose traditional constraints on the freedom of their form. Iconographically, the content is as ambiguous as it is declarative in coloristic terms.  

It should be noted that these works have never before, been shown as a group in a Canadian cultural institution, despite their importance and self-evident radicality as painting, and this in itself is a justification for showing them now. However, with a new appraisal of abstract practice in Canada now underway, the timing for such an exhibition is salutary.  

The curator, James D. Campbell, has written extensively on Canadian abstraction in recent years, including two books and several essays and reviews on John Heward's work over the last eight years.