Upon…Looking into the Void

 

Artist catalog statement 

Pittura/Immedia: Malerie in den 90er Jahren

Neue Galerie

Graz, Austria

1995

 

These few works are all part of a larger exploration (including the Covered Sites and the Perfume Paintings) that has been ongoing for some ten years, and that is the attempt to re-establish what could be called a deep-space of painting. A kind of critical rethinking of the deep, auratic space that once was a sort of “proof” of painting’s superior status within the visual media, but is now largely absent from it (whether from abandonment, abrogation, or systematic purging over the last hundred years).

 

Through the use of “polarized” or holographic foils (of the type used in children’s toys, or credit cards), combined with “social fluids (cosmetics, medical dyes, cleaning products etc.) suspended in a resin, I’ve tried to create “deep” ambiguous spaces which should have the desired effect of slightly displacing the viewer’s visual equilibrium for a moment, and in so doing re-produce for a moment this “lost” effect. To re-establish in a (post) modern environment, an interest in a “pre”-modern impulse…that of staring into a void.

 

Peter Hopkins

Graz, Austria

1995

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