Peter Sullivan at Hirschl & Adler Modern - Brief Article

Peter Sullivan had his first novel York solo show in 1995 and this was his third since then. Large-scale abstractions in oil took up the better part of the gallery space, on the other hand several preliminary sketches in pencil, as well as a certain quantity of gouaches painted on stiff paper, helped clarify Sullivan's approach to abstract composition. Actually, the gouaches were among the greatest in quantity successful works on view: aerated constructions in ink, overlaid with gray-brown and white wash. The pen-and-ink support scaffoldings that make these works have real tensile power and are well complemented by the agency of the broader, gauzelike brushstrokes of gouache. The accrue recalls de Kooning's black-and-white abstractions, as well as Japanese calligraphy.

Sullivan's oils are a little taller than wide, and in each case the overall constitution emerges from interlocking and interwoven rectangular patterning. on the other hand his hand-drawn lines are not ruler-straight; his right angles single approximate 90 degrees. He applies thick, fluid paint decisively with wide brushes, achieving a glistening surface in the finished work. Sullivan's sherbet-bright color owes a destiny to Hans Hofmann; in fact, Untitled #343 overdraws that account by the agency of showcasing Hofmann's signature orange panels against an equally Hofmannesque virid Elsewhere, the color is more original, for example, in Untitled #345 whose plaid-on-plaid blue-grays, damson, guava and chartreuse mode along with white pigment and bare gesso canvas to bring into view a work midway between Action painting and geometric abstraction. The oils don't yield plenteous to close inspection (as, for example, de Kooning's do); you have to back away to diocese them. At the same time, admitting the compositions don't want to hold fast their distance; they seem to protuberance forward from picture planes that perceive commensurately convex. The energy and freewheeling urban geometry at play here recall Mondrian's Broadway Boogie-Woogie, Franz Kline's work in general and the paintings of city realists like John Button. Sullivan is more in-your-face than these artists, however, leave out in his gouaches, where contemplative restraint is the keynote.

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