In his first solo exhibition in Los Angeles, Peter Hopkins shows a series of
staggeringly beautiful paintings at Christopher Grimes Gallery. These
are, however, quite deceptive. Produced without paint, brush or the artist’s touch, each is
a conceptual trope, dictated by a unique, predetermined and minutely calibrated system.
“Site O” is as
delicious as one of Helen Frankenthaler’s stain paintings. Only thepainterly incident is due to something as unaesthetic as
grime. “Site O” is, in fact, a double bedsheet that has been slept on for a specified
amount of time, dragged through New York’s
east River, and overlaid with a thin sheet of taffeta, for that special
sparkle, only art possesses – in theory, that is.
Hopkins’ paintings muddy up (quite literally)
the purity of the abstractions they conjure. They are tainted objects, soaked
not with pigment, but with surgical dye, bleach, or any number ofnoxious substances; and layered not with imagery, but with bolts of cheap, glittery fabric. In bringing the detritus of the
post-industrial environment into the bright, white realm of pure visuality, Hopkins adheres to the dialectical character of Robert Smithson, to whom the younger artist has long paid
homage.
Yet whereas
Smithson’s “non-sites” – rocks and debris imported into the gallery space from
various “sites” –hinge upon an oscillation between inside and outside, the
determinate and the indeterminate, the one and the many, Hopkins paintings do not.
Their sheer beauty consumes everything in their orbit,
including the myriad implications of the materials that formed them. Here, then, there is no
back-and-forth.
Hopkins also puts several perfumed pieces on
display. These likewise follow an elaborately detailed plan and attempt to infect the gallery
space with the carnal excess that space habitually represses. Yet, as with Hopkins’ paintings, the
information the viewer brings to these scented works dissipates in their
very presence. Though the artist seems determined to demonstrate how things might work
otherwise, sensuality overwhelms the mind – again, and yet again.