Howard Fonda makes earnest declarations about his medium. In the statement accompanying this show, for example, he writes: “I see painting as a philosophical sanctuary and spiritual outpost”; “Painting is poetic and transcendent”; and “Painting is a vehicle of contradiction adept at conveying the hubris of, and understanding of, existence.” Fonda desperately pines to be a Romantic; his tender portraits of bearded nineteenth-century philosophers and his text-based paintings composed of words like endless, timeless, limitless, and nothingness lay bare his infatuation with mystical truths. Yet zeal