Sharon Booma & Sammy Peters | Worlds Within: Contemporary Abstraction

Sharon Booma & Sammy Peters

WORLDS TitleWITHIN

SAM MY PETE R S

SHARON B OOMA

LewAllen4Galleries

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Sharon Booma & Sammy Peters Worlds Within: Contemporary Abstraction October 1 - 30, 2021

Railyard Arts District | 1613 Paseo de Peralta | Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501 | 505.988.3250 www.lewallengalleries.com | contact@lewallengalleries.com Cover: Left: Sammy Peters, detail of Reform: ambiguous; uncertainty, 2020, Oil & mixed media on panel, 48" x 36" Right: Sharon Booma, detail of Quick and Just, 2021, Oil & mixed media on panel, 60" x 60"

Worlds Within: Contemporary Abstraction Worlds Within is an exhibition of works by Sharon Booma and Sammy Peters, two well-regarded and long-established painters, together illustrating two highly individual approaches to the very large subject of abstraction. In juxtaposing these very contemporary and very different visual manifestations, this exhibition has the virtue of reminding us of one of the most important moments in the course of modern cultural history, when artistic expression -- indeed all intellectual arenas -- made a radical departure from what had been the canons of aesthetic, literary, theatrical and musical convention.

Abstraction has, of course, become one of the central traditions of 20th and 21st century art. Clement Greenberg, the enormously influential art critic, once described it as the “master current” of the Modernist era, having emerged in painting beginning late in the 19th and early in the 20th centuries with the work of such visionary pioneers as Wassily Kandinsky, Hilma af Klint, and Piet Mondrian. Whereas the then-prevailing tradition of “figurative” painting sought to provide recognizable visual descriptions of the “outside” world, the original abstractionists (and indeed many modern practitioners of this mode of painting) produced work they believed to be non-objective manifestations of a spiritual “inner” world.

Contrasted with realist painters who endeavor to represent in their art recognizable imagery from their observed experience of the world, abstractionists look beyond the confines of naturalism, defined form, and specific subject to create visual expressions of the minds’ impressions and their personal emotional feelings. For realists there is a desire to imitate or represent nature, people, objects -- what is seen. For abstractionists the impetus is toward expressing the emotion-laden sensations of the mind. In both cases, their art is produced from “realities:” in the one case, those realities are more exterior, experienced through the eyes, and in the other, they are more interior, felt and imagined.

But it must be said that both representational painting and abstraction ultimately derive from the artist’s faithful devotion to lived experience – whether they are seen with the eye or experienced through the mind and the heart. Indeed, some art historians espouse the idea that abstract painting derives aesthetically from representational painting (i.e. Impressionism, Expressionism, Cubism, etc.). But both inevitably involve their lived experience.

This exhibition features two artists who illustrate much of the underlying ethos of contemporary abstraction in painting and aesthetic scope. In different ways the work of each artist demonstrates the free-thinking individuality and liberated expression that lies at the heart of abstraction.

Over a career that has spanned more than five decades, Sammy Peters has been admired for his multilayered canvases that evoke an alchemical approach to material and image. His paintings represent an unfettered convergence of color, shape, pattern, and texture, assembled in a process that appears to combine creative improvisation with thoughtful construction. These works evince a muscular facture –

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strong colors, assertive shapes, and forceful geometry – and arrays of patterned imagery that beg the question of whether totemic or archetypal references might be embedded in them. On another level, the works can be seen to present visual carnivals full of playful complexity that demand serious contemplation.

Through the meticulous accumulation of texture, Peters’ art is regarded for its unexpected modulations between opacity and translucency, color and patterning – the result of a singular combination of cold wax media, luminous resins, and richly saturated oils refined over Peters’ long-celebrated painting practice. In these works, an atmosphere of mystery is heightened by geometric forms that advance forwards through gestural collections of sensuous texture.

Peters’ canvases attract the eye with their unexpected but delightful composition of blocks and patches of color, variegated shadings, an endless variety of elaborate shapes, and twisting, looping lines. There is an internal energy exuding from these works that enraptures the viewer in a heady veil of jovial sophistication.

The works included in this exhibition demonstrate a particular inventiveness with playful forms and bold color. Peters incorporates a variety of pictorial conventions ranging from semiotics to decoupage, and as a result, his canvases reference the full implications of collage – its textural sophistication as well as its depth of associations. His coarse, well-worn surfaces evoke an aspect of timelessness.

Peters’ work combines a rollicking sense of collaged elements and lively colors to create fascinating resonances of life’s complicated and opposing forces and rhythms. His complex interplay of expressive brushwork, scribbles and drips, collaged papers and fabrics, and subtly figurative drawn elements are layered in a way that suggests an intricate, intelligent game of mysterious activity.

The works of Sharon Booma provide an interesting rhapsodic counterpoint to the staccato exuberance of Peters’ works. Her compositions in this exhibition evince a subdued atmospheric quality that is both relaxing and intriguing. Is this perhaps the landscape of Booma’s inner world – a place of refined beauty with promontories of unexpected interest? With a restrained pallet and extensive repertoire of pentimento techniques and mark making, Booma’s works recall the exoticism of Cy Twombly’s scraffito and the quiet power of Rothko’s color regions. Her work epitomizes a quintessential understanding of the aesthetic basis of Modernism, brought forward into the 21st century.

Booma is recognized for her enigmatic mixed media paintings that wield an extraordinary array of textures and rhythms of color. They feature a multitude of dynamic visual relationships, which the artist guides into a state of charged equilibrium. Her surfaces are the result of a careful process that laces 3

Worlds Within: Contemporary Abstraction together intertwining webs of balance and tension through washes of veiled color and broad fields of visual texture. Further activating her imagery is her intrepid use of mark-making, which includes rhythmic arrangements of geometric shapes, looping fields of astrological matter, scraffito, and languageless writing. Often half-hidden behind liminal walls of opaque color, these marks seem to zig-zag or unfurl through space, like messages beamed into view from an inner world of feeling and memory. “These paintings bring my impulses, intuition, and deep emotional feelings to a more conscious level,” she writes.

“Throughout there is a constant theme—an attempt to control and balance chaotic forces in our lives.”

Here we have paintings that seem to channel a sense of the mystical and the spiritual: impulses that Kandinsky would surely cheer. Though Booma’s works are chromatically disciplined, one senses that the range of her intuitive expression is expansive. In these mixed-media on panel paintings there is suggested an intensely personal conception of the world and the artist’s own feelings and responses to it. Their misty surfaces often feature subtle tones of blue, gray, or ecru, punctuated by eruptions of orange, khaki, or black. The spontaneity of drawn marks along with the intended inscrutability of purported word forms, combine with the sensuousness of surfaces to exude equal parts mystery and siren call. The ineffability and elevated simplicity of these compositions beckons closer scrutiny in search of the artist’s inner vision.

In their individually articulated ways, both Peters and Booma create work that demonstrates how expressions of inner reality can both delight and resonate with viewers. Both artists entertain our gaze while simultaneously delving deeply to reach an emotional core that reverberates and produces in their work what James Turrell called the “wordless thought that comes from looking in a fire.” It’s that “wordless thought” that these paintings adeptly inspire and in so doing, in their own ways, they bring the ineffable a bit closer and make it more real.

Kenneth R Marvel

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Sammy Peters

Sharon Booma

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Sharon Booma

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Sharon Booma Grace, Presence, Restraint, 2021 Oil & mixed media on panel, 60" x 60" 8

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Sharon Booma Clear and Complete, 2021 Oil & mixed media on panel, 60" x 60" 10

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Sharon Booma Almost Triumphant, 2021 Oil & mixed media on panel, 72" x 48" 12

Sharon Booma A Slow Graceful Procession, 2021 Oil & mixed media on panel, 60" x 60" 14

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Sharon Booma Direct and Determined, 2021 Oil & mixed media on panel, 48" x 48" 16

Sharon Booma Headstrong, 2021 Oil & mixed media on panel, 42" x 42" 18

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Sharon Booma Oddly Reassuring, 2021 Oil & mixed media on panel, 42" x 42" 20

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Sharon Booma Of Sustenance, 2021 Oil & mixed media on panel, 42" x 42" 22

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Sharon Booma Inexorable Patience, 2021 Oil & mixed media on panel, 72" x 48" 24

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Sharon Booma Suddenly Not There, 2021 Oil & mixed media on panel, 48" x 48" 26

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Sharon Booma Stunned at the Impermanence, 2021 Oil & mixed media on panel, 72" x 48" 28

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Sharon Booma Utterly Exposed, 2021 Oil & mixed media on panel, 72" x 48" 30

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Sharon Booma Quick and Just, 2021 Oil & mixed media on panel, 60" x 60" 32

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Sharon Booma Separated and Connected, 2021 Oil & mixed media on panel, 48" x 48" 34

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Sharon Booma Sometimes Contentment is a Matter of Will, 2021 Oil & mixed media on panel, 48" x 48" 36

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Sharon Booma There Existed an Inner World, 2021 Oil & mixed media on panel, 42" x 42" 38

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Sammy Peters

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Sammy Peters Colossal: independent; remainder, 2021 Oil & mixed media on panel, 60" x 48" 42

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Sammy Peters Current: emerging; threshold, 2021 Oil & mixed media on panel, 22" x 30" 44

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Sammy Peters Uncertainty: signaled; acceptance, 2020 Oil & mixed media on panel, 48" x 48" 46

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Sammy Peters Reminder: modified; sphere, 2021 Oil & mixed media on panel, 48" x 48" 48

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Sammy Peters Reform: ambiguous; uncertainty, 2020 Oil & mixed on paper, 48" x 36" 50

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Sammy Peters Preserved: transforming: existence, 2020 Oil & mixed media on panel, 48" x 36" 52

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Sammy Peters Fragment: encountered; rhythm, 2021 Oil & mixed media on panel, 48" x 48" 54

Sammy Peters Engendered: fictional; affirmation, 2021 Oil & mixed media on panel, 48" x 48" 56

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Sammy Peters Remote: fictional; victory, 2020 Oil & mixed media on panel, 48" x 48" 58

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Sammy Peters Conception: objective; devotion, 2021 Oil & mixed media on panel, 60" x 48" 60

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Sammy Peters Altered: final; suspension, 2021 Oil & mixed media on panel, 72" x 60" 62

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Railyard Arts District | 1613 Paseo de Peralta | Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501 | 505.988.3250 www.lewallengalleries.com | contact@lewallengalleries.com © 2021 LewAllen Contemporary, LLC 66 Artwork © Sharon Booma, Artwork © Sammy Peters