Expanding on the notion of a ‘personal atmosphere’, Howlett’s new exhibition undertakes a melancholic mapping of surface and structure. Layered and compartmentalized, the works give shape to an ongoing conflation of interiority and exteriority, familiarity and estrangement, accumulating as much as building.
In these new works, architectural and domestic spaces become vessels for thought and feeling, figurative structures that alternately elaborate and obfuscate. Often beginning with schematic imagery from early Renaissance illustrations, Howlett stages abstraction through the lens of humoral theory—the classical system linking bodily fluids to health and temperament. This conceptual grounding opens the work to a fluid interplay of certainty and uncertainty between places, objects, and bodies.
Across multiple mediums—including distemper, egg tempera, watercolor, shellac, oil stick, metal leaf, and oil paint—Howlett constructs richly complex surfaces that hold space as much as depict it. His practice remains rooted in attentive looking and ongoing revision, producing paintings that continually renegotiate their own structure and meaning.
