David Allan Peters by Miles McEnery Gallery

DAVID ALLAN PETERS

MILES McENERY GALLERY

DAVID ALLAN PETERS

MILES M c E N E RY G A L L E RY

520 West 21st Street New York NY 10011

tel +1 212 445 0051 www.milesmcenery.com

525 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011

DAVID ALLAN PETERS: PENTIMENTO IN REVERSE By Phoebe Hoban

Old paint on canvas, as it ages, sometimes becomes transparent. When that happens it is possible, in some pictures, to see the original lines: a tree will show through a woman’s dress, a child makes way for a dog, a large boat is no longer on an open sea. That is called pentimento because the painter “repented,” changed his mind. Perhaps it would be as well to say that the old conception, replaced by a later choice, is a way of seeing and then seeing again. —Lillian Hellman, Pentimento

David Allan Peters brings a whole new dimension to the term pentimento, creating vibrant abstract work that puts a dramatic spin on the Italian word, which means repentance. Rather than “repenting” (or repainting) to conceal what lies beneath, Peters meticulously carves away the surface of his vividly colored, tactile paintings to reveal their underlying layers. Ghosts of earlier images don’t gradually emerge: The artist literally cuts open his work so that you can see it, and then see it again. A masterful synthesis of process and product, art and artifact, each piece, like a topographical map, is a textured stratification that artfully tracks its own history. Most painters approach a blank canvas with a paintbrush. Peters uses neither a canvas nor, ultimately, a brush. Instead, he coats various-sized wood panels with multitudinous layers of diﬀerently colored acrylic, his carefully mixed palette guided by intuition. Because each of the hundreds of layers takes time to dry, he moves from one panel to another, assembly-line style. Once a panel is

suﬃciently layered, its surface is ground smooth and painted white. Peters then uses a Sharpie to divide the “canvas” into a grid, providing the schematic for the finished work. The built-up panel is then skillfully dissected; carving as gestural painting. “I paint using sculptural techniques,” the artist says. Using a linocut knife and the occasional spatula or trowel, Peters attacks his canvas, surgically excavating each layer of color in painstakingly cut patterns ranging from diamonds to starbursts. Instead of brushstrokes, Peters’ paintings are composed of thousands of diﬀerent-sized cuts. In Peters’ work, the background essentially becomes the foreground; the process is the painting.

The grid provides a modicum of control over the pattern, and the edges of the panels, which show the multiple layers of paint, stacked up like the pages of a book, are something of a color key. But the real talent is in knowing how many cuts to make, and how deep to make them. “Once I start cutting, that’s when the color and pattern starts happening,” the artist says. “I can go deeper, higher, lower. That’s the payoﬀ, finding the right mixture to make the painting harmonious.” Peters’ process evolved over time, influenced by his work as a preparator in museums and as an assistant to his mentor, the abstract painter Karl Benjamin, known for his colorful, hard-edge geometric work. “I couldn’t do hard-edge painting,” says the artist. “I tried so hard. That’s when I found my own process.” Working in Benjamin’s studio was a turning point; he began to trust his intuition and to experiment with color. Also “highly influential” were Richard Serra’s early molten lead splash/cast pieces. And Jay DeFeo’s celebrated, defining work, The Rose, a monumental carved and encrusted painting with a starburst center, was a major inspiration. The iconic piece was created using what DeFeo herself called “a marriage of painting and sculpture.” Recalls Peters: “When I was at the San Francisco Art Institute, The Rose was embedded in the wall there, hidden in the conference room for years, and the Whitney was working with the school to move it out and restore it. I would

come in and watch these guys tinkering with taking big pieces of plaster out of the cracks of this giant slab painting. And that was another changing point, when I was thinking, ‘This is really amazing, to see what kind of accumulation of material is possible with that scale.’ I kept a little piece of the plaster.” Peters, who grew up in Cupertino, California, started experimenting early on with “distressing” layers of paint. As a child, he copied old master paintings from his parents’ art history books, then layered the tints of paint or stain, sanding them down to enhance their colors. “Everyone talks about the Mona Lisa’s smile, but I would paint her hands as best I could and then muck them up, kind of hiding things and revealing them.” Later, when studying at Claremont Graduate University, he worked as a preparator at galleries and museums. The work involved not only painting walls, but also filling the post-exhibition holes that revealed various layers of the artwork. “Behind all the walls of the museums and galleries there would be layers of color and stuﬀ. When you were repairing it, repainting it and making it pristine, you would see what was going on in the physical wall. So I was actually kind of doing my process even in the museums.” His experience as a preparator informed his art practice. Hiding and revealing: painting as reverse pentimento. The resulting pieces, some so thickly layered that they look like textiles, have striking kaleidoscopic motifs that shift and change, their positive space alternating with negative space, depending on the viewer’s distance and angle. Although he cites Minimalism as a major influence, Peters’ work can look like an impressionistic, 3-D, multihued take on Op Art. The patterns range from geometric—think of a Navajo rug—to marbleized to quilt-like. The full spectrum of a Peters painting unpeels into a dizzying array of perspectives. Each of the thousands of cuts and scoops can be seen close up. From several feet away, the detailed topography is flattened, but the overall pattern—the grid made up of squares or diamonds—is visible. The myriad layers of acrylic paint used to create the seemingly endless color permutations can be seen on the edges of the canvas, piled up like pieces of construction paper. Contemplating a Peters canvas is like simultaneously looking at the prismatic wing of a bird, its feathers, and, under a microscope, a single strand of a plume.

Untitled #13 (2017) is one of Peters’ more impressionistic paintings, with the grid disappearing into a field of what look like red and yellow blossoms. From a distance, it looks pretty, floral, and a bit random—like a meadow of flowers. But close up, you can see that each blossom shape is carved within a carefully chiseled diamond in an argyle pattern. “The many carved lines are my markmaking as I chip away at the paint, but the circles which look like flowers or tree rings are random mounds of the material that were then flattened out,” the painter explains. The eﬀect is like “a Monet lily floating on the water.” Untitled #19 (2017) has a similar color scheme, but here the canvas has been divided up into very large diamonds, their outlines clearly visible or, as Peters puts it: “I brought up the grid. And enlarged the carving aspect. I cut six- or seven-inch horizontal lines rather than smaller chips. What I am trying to achieve is expanding my mark.” Once again, the close-up view is astonishing: Each undulating, carved ribbon consists of half a dozen colors exposed in concentric ellipses. 6

Untitled #15 (2018) is one of several works that feature starburst patterns, which, as the artist points out, “really activate the canvas.” Peters uses this constellation motif to great eﬀect in #15, which has a sunlit palette, full of yellow and orange. The starbursts are relatively large; each completely occupies its own square in the grid. Peters uses the same pattern in Untitled #14 (2018) in a cooler palette with more blues and greens, and in Untitled #12 (2018), which has a muted pastel palette and is among the most lyrical and delicate of his canvases. Peters takes a leap in his most recent work, with a notable turn toward Minimalism. Untitled #3 (2019) places large dark blue and red starbursts within a grid. Untitled #1 (2019) uses the same color scheme but boldly divides the canvas into two large triangles merged along their shared hypotenuse. “That’s a new direction for me,” the artist says. “The diagonal canvas was painted as two separate paintings on one panel. The diagonal rift represents a gesture, like a brushstroke. When I started the piece, I had no idea what it would eventually look like, just that it would have something happening diagonally. I feel the diagonal gesture references my connection to Minimalism. Most of my

finished paintings have an overall palette than can remind me of a colorful Monet. With that diagonal stripe, I am totally removed from Monet’s garden. I don’t want to keep making the same thing. I want to move things around and keep my mark fresh.”

Phoebe Hoban has written about culture and the arts for a variety of publications, including The New York Times, New York Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, Vogue, Vanity Fair, GQ, Harper’s Bazaar, ARTnews, and The New York Observer, among others. She is the author of three artist biographies: Basquiat: A Quick Killing in Art (Viking/Penguin, 1998, 2004; and as an e-book, Open Road, 2016), Alice Neel: The Art of Not Sitting Pretty (St. Martin’s Press, 2010), and Lucian Freud: Eyes Wide Open (New Harvest/Houghton Miﬄin Harcourt, 2014).

Untitled #11, 2017

Acrylic on panel 48 x 36 inches 121.9 x 91.4 cm

Untitled #12, 2017 Acrylic on panel 48 x 36 inches 121.9 x 91.4 cm

Untitled #15, 2017 Acrylic on panel 48 x 36 inches 121.9 x 91.4 cm

Untitled #16, 2017

Acrylic on panel 48 x 36 inches 121.9 x 91.4 cm

Untitled #17, 2017

Acrylic on panel 48 x 36 inches 121.9 x 91.4 cm

Untitled #19, 2017 Acrylic on panel 48 x 36 inches 121.9 x 91.4 cm

Untitled #5, 2018 Acrylic on panel 48 x 36 inches 121.9 x 91.4 cm

Untitled #11, 2018

Acrylic on panel 48 x 36 inches 121.9 x 91.4 cm

Untitled #12, 2018 Acrylic on panel 48 x 36 inches 121.9 x 91.4 cm

Untitled #14, 2018 Acrylic on panel 48 x 36 inches 121.9 x 91.4 cm

Untitled #15, 2018 Acrylic on panel 48 x 36 inches 121.9 x 91.4 cm

Untitled #1, 2019 Acrylic on panel 48 x 36 inches 121.9 x 91.4 cm

Untitled #2, 2019 Acrylic on panel 48 x 36 inches 121.9 x 91.4 cm

Untitled #3, 2019 Acrylic on panel 48 x 36 inches 121.9 x 91.4 cm

Untitled #4, 2019 Acrylic on panel 48 x 36 inches 121.9 x 91.4 cm

Published on the occasion of the exhibition

DAVID ALLAN PETERS 30 May – 6 July 2019 Miles McEnery Gallery 520 West 21st Street New York NY 10011 tel +1 212 445 0051 www.milesmcenery.com Publication © 2019 Miles McEnery Gallery All rights reserved Essay © 2019 Phoebe Hoban

Photography by Christopher Burke Studio, New York, NY Color separations by Echelon, Santa Monica, CA Catalogue layout by McCall Associates, New York, NY ISBN: 978-1-949327-13-7 Cover: Untitled #1, (detail), 2019

MILES M c E N E RY G A L L E RY

DAVID ALLAN PETERS

MILES McENERY GALLERY