PETER BUREGA THE SKY LIES OPEN
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Peter Burega The Sky Lies Open
Railyard Arts District | 1613 Paseo de Peralta | Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501 | tel 505.988.3250 www.lewallengalleries.com | contact@lewallengalleries.com cover: The Sky Lies Open, Amapas No. 2 (detail), 2020, oil on panel, 48 x 42 inches
Peter Burega: The Sky Lies Open The work of art is born of the artist in a mysterious and secret way. From him it gains life and being… Nor is its existence casual and inconsequent, but it has a definite and purposeful strength, alike in its material and spiritual life. Wassily Kandinsky In his art, Peter Burega confers an especially engaging personal vision of nature as an intangible, ethereal, sacred place of light and color. His meditative abstract paintings create a kind of new reality in their abstract compositions, taking visual cues from landscape, but preserving a quality of mystery that distills his scenes into a weightless dance of elements: light, color, shadow, and temperature, as real in their feeling as the places which inspire them. In these works, there is an abandonment of consciousness and an embrace of the meditative. By removing any obvious allusions to identifiable landscape forms, Burega transforms the sense of place into that of an infinite beyond. The exquisite paintings included in this major exhibition of Burega’s most recent work, entitled The Sky Lies Open, illustrate these qualities beautifully. Burega expresses his contemplative response to nature in part through careful nuances of light, shadow, and disembodied color which he skillfully applies in layers of oil pigments. Intertwining warm wisps of ochre, briskly refreshing blues, and other subdued passages of wafting hue, Burega’s art gives the sensation of emotionally charged air, intoxicating and alluringly redolent with endless imaginative possibilities. He is an artist of gently blowing wind, of cooling sea breeze, of fiery light at sunset, of the pale beginnings of morning sun. With a Burega painting, you don’t so much only look at it as inhale it, breathing in light and color that, at the hand of the artist, has sublimated into evocative memories and sensations of nature’s most glorious essences. Though Burega’s works may contain hints of what we might recognize as land, bodies of water, horizon lines, or sunlight cast from above, they suggest places where we can perceive with our imagination or intuition rather than just with any of our basic human senses. Enlisting dynamic textures, subtle harmonies of color and radiant light to suggest a range of emotional tonalities, 2
Burega’s paintings present a beguiling tension between concealment and revelation and become windows into the uncharted landscapes of the inner self. Burega is a consummate romanticist, willing to empty landscape of its familiar forms in favor of retaining the most universal and exhilarating emotional resonances of the consummate beauty that resides there. In the drift of gazing at Burega’s paintings, one is able to feel a sensation of place; memory is activated and the somewhere-felt is remembered, even if only in the vague way of the painting itself. By dissolving any representational elements, the painting visually diffuses the recognizable, liberates the constraints of the particular, and frees the equivocal to incite rare imagination at the dizzying brink of the unknowable. In this process, Burega ignites and instills in his work a deeply felt intuitive appreciation of the sublime. His abstractions derive from his unmediated impressions and responses to being in nature and share a glimpse of what the pure experience of immanence and sublimity might be like. In the vividness of these sensations there is a feeling of a new reality, a place of equanimity where imagination is free to run its course. All this emerges from Burega's keen observations and impressions of beautiful places. His work masterfully abstracts spontaneous iterations of those experiences and the beauty the artist has experienced there, thought deeply about, and felt passionately, all of it metamorphosed into oil on panel. His paintings are the physical manifestations of his impressions, his sensations, his dreams, of nature's profound exquisiteness, and that sense of the infinite which nature in its fullness possesses. In Burega’s work, memory is called upon from the dream-like semblance of his artistic iterations that no longer describe specificity but instead transmogrify the seen into the vastly more complex realm of the felt. It is through his intensely passionate response to remembered experience and contemplation of the land, sea and sky that imagination is freed to blur the boundaries between the particulars of observation and the feelings they engender. This is what Burega achieves in his evocative paintings, conferring a sense of fascination and comfort from compositions comprised of exquisite balances of color, light and assemblages of myriad 3
lines and brush marks as vibrant as sparks of energy zipping through the universe. Here too is the magic of Burega's abstraction: it dematerializes observation, interrupts time, and gently expresses the essences of the beautiful that the artist has experienced in observing landscapes, being by the sea, and looking at the sky. Burega’s mode of experiencing these is not superficial but rather deeply spiritual and redolent with profound inner meaning that drives his expression on canvas. The viewer too experiences from his paintings a sense of transcendence to a nebula of pure feeling that enchants, beckons recollection, and imparts a deep sense of enduring joy. Countering the immateriality of Burega’s images are their lively, variegated surface textures. Building his work through layers of brushed and scraped paint, Burega utilizes scraffito and other subtractive processes to educe dynamic rhythms of space and depth. The duality between vaporous image and physical surface provides enough footing for our imagination—or our subconscious—to co-inhabit with the realm of feeling contained in each painting. Just as J.M.W. Turner’s late sky paintings aimed to capture certain qualities of the sublime in their romantic interpretation of nature, Burega’s paintings too have their sights set on the ineffable. His evocative atmospheric compositions enlist the unconscious, activating experiences or feelings that may be lost in the folds of memory. “Although my work is abstract, it develops from my experience and interaction with the land,” Burega writes. “They are inspired by moments taken from daily life, dreams, experiences, and visual impressions. Studies of my environment—light, shadow, reflection—conspire to form my work.” Nature can of course be nearly overwhelming in the awesomeness of its observed beauty, and from the realization of its eternal existence. By comparison to the latter, human lives are but a flash in time. The fullness of nature’s wondrous beauty humbles even the greatest of artists and poets. But in these responses and from the contemplation of their ultimate incomprehensibility, there resides the glowing heart of the sublime, that precious gift of astonishment and wonder, of being exquisitely overwhelmed, of knowing (feeling) that there is a realm of the infinite beyond the human capacity to fully know. This is the ultimate sense of exhilaration that touches the soul. 4
By his treatment of nature’s boundless beauty and its sense of eternity, with his elegant extraction of its essences, Burega plunges into the insuperable realms of its very being, adeptly creating art that takes gentle possession of our attention and absorbs it in the pleasures of feeling nature’s astonishing wonders and infinite beauty. The result is paintings that evoke rather than describe, invite rather than insist. His paintings are about delight and the freedom of the imagination to wander about nature and encounter the extraordinary. These are paintings fit for permanence of enjoyment and contemplation. If one looks carefully, one might even feel in these works the poetic rhymes of that which cannot be explained and the inimitable vibrations of the sublime. Kenneth R. Marvel
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The Sky Lies Open, Agua Azul, 2020, oil on panel, 60 x 39 7/8 inches
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The Sky Lies Open, Playa Esmerelda, 2020, oil on panel, 48 x 60 inches
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The Sky Lies Open, Dos Lunas, 2020, oil on panel (diptych), 60 x 160 inches
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The Sky Lies Open, Traveling Light, 2020, oil on panel, 60 x 60 inches
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The Sky Lies Open, Playa Palmeres, 2020, oil on panel, 54 x 54 inches
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The Sky Lies Open, Puesta del Sol 2020, oil on panel, 42 x 76 inches
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The Sky Lies Open, Sombra de Luna, 2020, oil on panel, 54 x 54 inches
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The Sky Lies Open, Amapas No. 2, 2020, oil on panel, 48 x 42 inches
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The Sky Lies Open, Borrowed Light, 2020, oil on panel 60 x 72 inches
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The Sky Lies Open, Playa Rosa, Costa Careyes, No. 1, 2020, oil on panel, 41 3/4 x 39 7/8 inches The Sky Lies Open, Playa Rosa, Costa Careyes, No. 2, 2020, oil on panel, 41 3/4 x 47 7/8 inches The Sky Lies Open, Playa Rosa, Costa Careyes, No. 3, 2020, oil on panel, 41 3/4 x 39 7/8 inches
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The Sky Lies Open, Two Suns, 2020, oil on panel, 33 x 68 inches
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The Sky Lies Open, No. 10, 2020, oil on panel, 42 x 40 inches
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The Sky Lies Open, No. 15, 2020, oil on panel, 50 x 60 inches
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The Sky Lies Open, Luz de la Noche, 2020, oil on panel 72 x 72 inches
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The Sky Lies Open , Aguas Tranquilas, 2020, oil on panel, 47 7/8 x 72 inches
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The Sky Lies Open, Playa Luna, 2020, oil on panel, 48 x 96 inches
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Untitled I, 2020, oil on paper, 51 x 36 inches
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Untitled no. 2, 2020, oil on paper, 35 x 27 inches
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Peter Burega b. 1965, Montreal, Quebec, Canada EDUCATION
2009
Meyer East Fine Art, Santa Fe, NM
1984-87 B.A. from McGill University, Montreal, Canada
Bennett Street Gallery, Atlanta, GA
1987-91 Juris Doctorate from Whittier College, CA
2008
Meyer East Fine Art, Santa Fe, NM
1990
Coda Gallery, New York, NY & Palm Desert, CA
2007
Gallery 225, Santa Fe, NM
SELECTED EXHIBITIONS
Coda Gallery, New York, NY
2020
LewAllen Galleries, Santa Fe, NM
Mulry Fine Art, Palm Beach, FL
2019
LewAllen Galleries, Santa Fe, NM
2007
Art Basel, Miami, FL
2018
Craighead Green Gallery, Dallas, TX
2006
Ventana Fine Art, Santa Fe, NM
Hunter Kirkland Contemporary, Santa Fe, NM
Coda Gallery, Palm Desert, CA & New York, NY
Smith Klein Gallery, Boulder, CO
2005
Mulry Fine Art, Palm Beach, FL
Abbozzo Gallery, Toronto, Canada
Long Beach Museum of Art, Long Beach, CA
Pryor Fine Art, Atlanta, GA
Coda Gallery, New York, NY
2017
Hunter Kirkland Contemporary, Santa Fe, NM
2005
Ventana Fine Art, Santa Fe, NM
Smith Klein Gallery, Boulder, CO
2004
Ventana Fine Art, Santa Fe, NM
New River Fine Art, Ft Lauderdale, FL
Coda Gallery, Palm Desert, CA
2016
Craighead Green Gallery, Dallas, TX
Ameringer & Yohe Fine Art, Boca Raton, FL
Hunter Kirkland Contemporary, Santa Fe, NM
2003
Waxlander Gallery, Santa Fe, NM
Smith Klein Gallery, Boulder, CO
Long Beach Museum of Art, Long Beach, CA
New River Fine Art, Ft Lauderdale, FL
Coda Gallery, New York, NY
Pryor Fine Art, Atlanta, GA
2002
Coda Gallery, Palm Desert, CA
2015
Hunter Kirkland Contemporary, Santa Fe, NM
Waxlander Gallery, Santa Fe, NM
Craighead Green Gallery, Dallas, TX
Coda Gallery, New York, NY
Pryor Fine Art, Atlanta, GA
2001
Coda Gallery, Palm Desert, CA
SR Brennan Gallery, Palm Desert, CA
Ruth Bachofner Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
2014
Julie Mushafer, Boston, MA
Long Beach Museum of Art, Long Beach, CA
Hunter Kirkland Contemporary, Santa Fe, NM
Craighead Green Gallery, Dallas, TX
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS AND MEDIA
Pryor Fine Art, Atlanta, GA
2017
“The Calm Between Control and Chaos,” Boulder Life,
2013
Hunter Kirkland Contemporary, Santa Fe, NM
March issue.
Pryor Fine Art, Atlanta, GA
2016
“Peter Burega,” Western Art & Architecture, October/
2012
Hunter Kirkland Contemporary, Santa Fe, NM
November issue.
Pryor Fine Art, Atlanta, GA
2013-14 Nancy Zimmerman, “Chaos and Control in the Work of
Melissa Morgan Fine Art, Palm Desert, CA
Peter Burega,”
2011
Craighead Green Gallery, Dallas, TX
2012
Marina La Palma, THE Magazine, Feb/March issue.
Hunter Kirkland Contemporary, Santa Fe, NM
2009
Albuquerque Journal, August issue.
Pryor Fine Art, Atlanta, GA
2008
Focus Santa Fe, August issue.
2010
McLarry Modern, Santa Fe, NM
2006
Steven Biller, “In the Studio – Peter Burega,” Art +
Coda Gallery, Palm Desert, CA
Culture, Winter/Spring issue.
Bennett Street Gallery, Atlanta, GA
2005
“Into the Void,” Southwest Art, October issue.
Comparative Law from University of Florence, Italy
Fall/Spring issue.
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Railyard Arts District | 1613 Paseo de Peralta | Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501 | tel 505.988.3250 www.lewallengalleries.com | contact@lewallengalleries.com 32 Š 2020 LewAllen Contemporary, LLC Artwork Š Peter Burega