Art: Abstract Traffic

Since he moved to Los Angeles four years ago, Manhattan-born Artist Howard Warshaw, 30, has been fascinated by the crash and crush of its snarled traffic. For him, the city’s traffic signals, with their brightly colored blinking eyes, have “the directness and brilliance of Indian pictorial sign language.” One night, when he saw the bold white lines of intersection crosswalks framing a wrecked car and its injured driver, he decided that the “awful picture is the culmination of everything . . . the time when everything interlocks,” went home to paint it.

In a Beverly Hills gallery last week, a traffic light and a pendulum railway-crossing signal stood guard at Warshaw’s latest one-man show. Most of the 35 pictures, with such titles as Broken Figure and Traffic Signal and Bones on the Street, were focused on the drama of Los Angeles’ traffic. Wrecked Automobiles was a low-keyed tangle of telescoped cars stretched along the canvas with the careful arrangement of an abstract still life by Braque. In others, blinking lights and warning barriers stood ironic watch over prone figures with the cleanly severed limbs of antique statues.

Warshaw did not have to look far for ideas for his expertly drawn studies. “Every day,” he says, “I saw a good accident picture on the front page of the newspaper.” His vigorously abstract paintings might be interpreted by some as safety-first posters, but he denies any desire “to preach,” tries to steer clear of “the morbid aspects of an accident” by painting his traffic victims without any trace of gore.

Warshaw takes the speed and racket of modern city life as matters of course, believes that a painter needs to get the same dash and smash onto his canvases. His test of a picture: “Can a spectator, after driving 30-miles-an-hour up a neon-lit, billboard-splattered street, stop off at a gallery and see a painting without slowing down visually?” He hopes that, with his own work, the answer will always be yes.