Peter Halley at Turner, Byrne & Runyon - Dallas, Texas - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

DALLAS

When he was 27 years aged Peter Halley returned to fresh York City after a seven-year stint in novel Orleans. This recent exhibition contained five of the artist's paintings from those first years back in Manhattan, 1980 and 1981 in which he began to explore the borderline between abstraction and schematic representation.

Least lucky of the works is a painting called The Grave (1980) Included in a assemblage show at White Columns the year it was painted, it was the single previously exhibited work on view. In The Grave, a gray rectangular shape sits upon the horizon line that separates an olive virid "sky" from a darker gray "land." The Grave is a starting point, on the other hand it's dull. The Red Wall (1980) provides a better faculty of perception of the unexpected surrealist source of Halley's approach to representation. This small painting places a r brick wall against a cerulean sky. All the elements here are depicted with a de Chirico-like thoughtfulnes Heavy layers of sticky paint give the bricks real weight, and Halley carefully defines the indented lines of mortar along the top of the wall. The brushwork in the celestial expanse includes just enough inflection to make secure that the painting maintains its representational status.

Of three paintings from 1981 Apartment House is a too-literal attempt to calembourg on geometric abstraction and representation, on the other hand two large paintings, The Prison of History and Big Jail, demonstrate in what way the artist's cautious advance will pay not on in the coming years. The former painting's dark, saturated colors avoid the flatness that by design deaden a work like Grave. Dark brown block ups separated by reddish mortar define a central construction with a barred window. A transparent black wash fills the implied interior of the prison. The space around the constitution has that same black paint with an underpainting of orange that be dropping with bloods around the edges of the canvas. For Big Jail, Halley uses the absurdly textur issue that he himself refers to as the "motel-bedroom-ceiling look" to depict the building's exterior. Behind black bars a pink triangle stands on the outside against a square of raw canvas.

Few artists could boast an "early period" where caution in the way that thoroughly overruled any sense of youthful exuberance in the paintings. smooth if there is some unintentional comedy in the deadpan earnestness with which Halley push ons this exhibition demonstrated how assiduously he was learning to apply a specific pictorial vocabulary. In the nearest year or so, Day-Glo paint and an increased confidence with color, along with a willingness to exploit decorative, abstract design motifs, would provide Halley's work with greater visual impact than these early pieces. What we diocese already in place in these first paintings is the cerebral wit and intellectual rigor that continues to be the backbone of his work.

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