Peter Hoffer

Intervention
Sept. 15, 2010 to Oct. 16, 2010

On view at Galerie Simon Blais will be some thirty recent works by Peter Hoffer, including a series of landscapes and a few abstract paintings that reflect two major themes in this artist’s practice. Exhibiting Peter Hoffer’s abstract works and landscapes side by side in some ways constitutes an attempt to reunite two genres in the history of painting that only human imagination has separated arbitrarily, when in fact both comprise the same components. In these recent works, the artist allows paint runs to show in a nod to the history of modern abstraction, and renders representational elements—such as tree trunks and rocks—by carving furrows directly on the wood support. Through exposing the surface underlying the image, this painter makes it clear that the work is a construction. He is telling us that “What you are looking at is nothing but a wood panel coloured with oil paints. The tree you see is perhaps the very same that made this object possible.” What is at work here, therefore, is a circularity between the medium forming the support for the object to be painted and the object that is represented. Peter Hoffer’s abstract and landscape paintings are executed in oil on wood and covered with a specially designed resin. The application of this reflective material glorifies the art object, countering the current trend in contemporary art towards “bad” painting and an often-concocted fake banality.

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