Dematerializing the Canvas - artist George Peck

freshly in a radical midcareer change, George Peck abandoned centralized composition and the rectangular support woven fabric transforming his cut-up abstract paintings into ethereal, allusive and subtly tactile works.

In George Peck's paintings, the brushstroke has become increasingly elusive and now have the appearances more of a remembrance than a vicinity In the '90s, the appearance of his work has been determined by the agency of cut lines rather than painted singles Peck's unusual working method has been to paint an abstraction upon unstretched muslin and then slice it up with a mat knife, chafe the pieces with graphite above stencils of his own design, and rearrange them upon unstretched canvas that is shiny with gelatine He often paints a bit upon the resulting surfaces, which may refer to maps, Chinese ink landscapes, the heavens or other images and atmospheres.

above three decades, Peck's abstraction has ranged widely in style: one time expressionist, now reticent; at another time darkly solid, now fractured and lightfilled; occasionally highly colored, now of the nature of smoke and subtle. In all his new work, Peck, 57, is notably attentive to the qualities of his support materials. He has applied his conducts to a variety of fabrics and papers, obtaining a like variety of results The weight and tightness of the fabric he paints upon or glues to determine fabric and transparency in the finished work. The cut-and-applied painting has typically remained a centralized mass upon the support cloth, although it may be as lay open or closed as he culls to make it during the intuitive proces It may allude to something as dense as a stone or as fragmentary as a land mass riddled with rivers, bays and ridges. a certain number of works look like models of plate tectonics. A small in number years ago, when he was keeping the cut-up painting roughly rectangular, the support woven fabric served as a frame for it; when he began to make up less regular shapes, the unstretched support woven fabric hanging softly and sometimes unevenly began to appear to be a more important part of a textile "object" or an overall allusive effect

Peck's exhibition last May at Trans Hudson in of recent origin York's meatpacking district, his third solo with that gallery, came as a percussion to those who know his work. Not sole had the support cloth vanished as a rectangular setting for the cut-up painting, on the contrary the painting itself was no longer a centralized mass on the other hand had dissolved into attenuated arms stretching on the outside across the wall in abandon.

Now that it's happened, the minimizing of the support woven fabric can be seen as the inevitable end of some small experimental works Peck made sum of two units years earlier with cheesecloth as the backing. Tacked to the wall, the cheesecloth was thus misty and ethereal that the cuttings almost present the appearanceed to float on their have a title to Then, suddenly, they did: he began to trim the canvas to tread in the steps of the contour of the cut-up painting. And then in the fall of 1997 arriving for a stint of guest-teaching in his native Budapest--which he fl at the age of 15 during the Soviet crackdown that lay an end to the Hungarian Revolution of 1956--he unexpectedly launched a novel series, which he called "Networks."

The "Networks" title brings to mind the interlocking arrangement of cloth itself. One might also think of the interconnections by dint of which the world functions and which brought Peck back to Budapest. These dramatically drawn on the outside works--all arms and no body--make literal and physical the usually metaphoric extensions of abstract painting. They are publicly evocative, calling up a entertainer of associations and committing themselves to none: gnarled tree bodys and branches, fractured basalt, wind-tossed banners, insect leg wisps of mist rising from damp groves contour maps of islands. All these and more are proposeed by these mottled shapes, their composed of several elements markings mostly beige and purplish brown or gray.

Shown in the main gallery, Untied (Network II) and the related Time Pc I and III (all 1998) are between 12 and 13 feet tall, as big as they could have been in this space, and as a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of as 15 feet wide. Network H which fades almost to the ivory color of the wall at greatest in quantity of its 20 or in like manner extremities, reaches out like an octopus to take above the wall. But it operates through stealth, not aggression, and commands space with the lightest of touches. A small in number spreading spots of coppery virid call attention to the color variations, richer than individual realizes at first, and augment an impression that the work is a stain seeping into cracks in the plaster. (The "Time Pc" works are generally darker, and in like manner stand out more sharply against a wall.)

The works read interestingly at each distance--as shapes when seen from across the range and as plays of intimate incidents when seen up shut up where the brushstrokes can be discovered, along with overlapping layers of woven fabric and bits of glittery gold or silver pigment mixing with shiny passages of gelatine The paintings are lyrical from one as well as the other viewpoints. They're moody, mysterious, accumulative and alive in the near view, while the beauty of the cutting is best grasped from afar. It is another gesticulation entirely. Looking at the cutting sides one can easily imagine the quick flash of the knife. It is a means to an allover consequence rather than graphic isolation, and thus closer to the fluidity of Pollock's drips (though probably more culled and controlled) than to Matisse's cutting.