(Catalogue excerpt) ... Fowler's current imagery has no natural source, at least in the present. When I first encountered the forested landscape rendered in a dynamic orthagonal perspective in Fowler's paintings of a couple of years ago, I wondered at my sense of deja vu. In fact, I had seen this vista before, not in real life but in a Rubens painting, as Fowler confirmed. Now, the seemingly abstract overlays of pattern in Fowler's paintings have sources but in the more anonymous "folk" arts such as the powerful, geometric ordering of a Navajo chief's blanket and, in the two big paintings in this show, silhouettes of Greek amphora vessels. His images hover in front or behind each other, as they do in a museum where the motifs of distinct cultures drift and intersect like ectoplasm. The ghostliness of his otherwise vigorously painted canvases simply reifies an ongoing transparentizing of cultural phenomena. - Stephen Westfall