Peter Stephens at R.B. Stevenson - Brief Article

Peter Stephens, a young artist based in Buffalo, is as a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of translator as he is painter and photographer. For a decade now, he's worked with existing images and recast them in different mediums. He has made drawings of late-19th-century photographs, then printed them photochemically to achieve a canny resemblance to the original photographic sources. He has used reproductions of landscapes through Corot, Inness and Blakelock as types for his own paintings, setting up camp in the theory-strewn belt between original and copy. Stephens's images, like all translations, are innately ambiguous in authorship. They are neither the original work in question, nor a direct expression of the translator, on the other hand a third thing, an amalgam of motives and voices whose true hybridity demands attention.

For this display Stephens painted large-scale versions of black-and-white landscape photographs by means of Alvin Langdon Coburn, Eugene Atget, Karl Struss and other turn-of-the-century Pictorialists. There is an amusing circularity to Stephens's enterprise. To paint versions of photographs that themselves aspire to the fabric and atmosphere of paintings is a bit like a dog chasing his have tail--if he succeeds in getting it between his teeth he's stuck

The paintings have a well-bred repetitive beauty, the monochrome palette shifting (often within each painting) from somewhat cold bluish tones to warmer sepia, and the webs from matte to glossy and crackled. Stephens veils the pastoral controls with milky washes that streak the surface, and a brown glaze that drips languorously down it. the pair intensify the mood of romanticism, on the other hand also distance us from the place and time they help idealize. of that kind oscillation--between intimacy and distance, now and then, the clarity of direct vision and the fogginess of dreams--generates a certain quantity of complexity within Stephens's paintings, on the contrary their visual range feels hinder from growthed by what has become a formulaic approach.

Many passages, however, transcend the generic layering to resonate lusciously. In Hachette 09-01 when stripes of warm, slick varnish abut wintry streaks of white along the right side of the canvas, where the silhouette of an ornate park lamppost appears, the display takes on all the dimensionality and temporal fluidity that Stephens intends. In Porterfield 09-04 diagonal rays of light stream from one side tree branches and mesh with the vertical run of the overlying white haze, allowing one set of streaks belongs inside the image and the other atop it. This visual friction finally allows Stephens to deliver upon his promises of nostalgia, memory, synchronicity and anachronism, and distinguishes his work from simple, art-smart appropriation.

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