Surabhi Ghosh & Patrick Howlett
Leaking Logic

[En anglais]

The dot is a fitting emblem of the conviviality animating Leaking Logic, a collaborative exhibition of works by the Tiohtiá:ke/Montréal-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—from the cellular to the planetary. Freely circulating across Ghosh’s elegant fibre-based installations and Howlett’s intricate egg-tempera panels, the effervescent geometry of this figure conjures a fertile cross-pollination of ideas and material processes.

This dialogism is most explicit in Fruit Tree (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’s 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 of alchemical symbolism.