The profiles of two women peer from the edges of Ridley Howard’s painting Shape Visions, their unblemished features aglow with light that seems to emanate from a group of pastel squares, circles and lozenges floating against a black background. What is this image? An ’80s New Wave album cover? A moisturizer ad? A metaphysical conundrum? That Ridley’s work raises such questions points to its vaguely unsettling weirdness, an effect amplified by the way the artist paints smooth, flattened forms with delicately soft edges, matte surfaces and winking references to vintage commercial design.
Howard’s understated surrealism takes on a (hetero)sexual charge in a small painting of a couple sunbathing topless and another of a naked pair kissing in front of a window. In a third, a man and a woman appear to be having sex, though we can only see their heads jutting from the left side of the composition, which is otherwise filled by a soft-focus landscape. Framing the lovers are sets of stripes—red for the woman, blue and white for the man—forming a right angle behind them. Are these the x and y axes of their ecstasy or just an ill-advised stab at interior décor?
By infusing the everyday with such subtle incongruities, Howard suggests the presence of hidden truths in his canvases that are never revealed. Instead, he quietly prefers to keep us guessing.