Peter Halley

Galleria Massimo Minini, Brescia
Galleria Gian Enzo Sperone, Rome (Through November 30)

"I decided to take the fact of geometry's form omnipresence in the social landscape as a given," wrote Peter Halley in 1988. With these words Halley laid bare the link between his painting - colored, geometric designs - and real world experience, clearly setting it apart from classical abstraction. Against the notion that there is a direct, empathic, almost mystic interaction between form, color and the inner self, Halley proposes that geometry bears a collective, social meaning. His forms are diagrammatic – more referential than abstract. No longer symbols of the absolute, his works relate to contemporary life, with its electronic circuits, grid-plan streets and city architecture, and evoke their incessant overlapping.

In these two Italian exhibitions, Halley presents the results of his most recent endeavors. This time round, the geometric forms extend beyond the edges of the paintings themselves to entirely cover the walls and surrounding environment. They envelope the visitor in a space defined by the meticulous precision of computerized designs.

In the rectangular room of the Minini gallery, Halley has displayed vertical paintings on the longer walls and one large, horizontal painting on the wall at the back of the room. In so doing he recreates a typical church plan, with side chapels and an altarpiece. At the Sperone gallery, on the other hand, the artist has drawn a more obvious contrast between the color scheme of the paintings and their extensions along the walls. Halley must have felt that his style risked becoming excessively “figurative”.

And so, rather than withdraw into a hermetically sealed process of analyzing ever-further inwards, the artist renders them all encompassing, omnipresent in ever-brighter, almost hypnotic acid colors. By evidencing and expanding, Halley seems to move away from the dry concentration of his earlier period in favor of a more mobile, emotive setting for his images.






Stefano Chiodi and Salvatore Lacagnina
Translation by Rosalind Furness