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Lot Essay
Peter Halley’s Desperate Measures, 1998, looks as vast as a cityscape and as microscopic as a computer chip. In the painting, concentric rectangles of hot pink, rose, dove grey and black mediate between the pictorial and social realms. Halley mixed pearlescent powders and textural additives into his paints, creating alternatively, iridescent shimmer reminiscent of Andy Warhol’s Diamond Dust series, and textural coarseness. At first glance, Desperate Measures seems a continuation of long-held Modernist tenets, but unlike earlier abstract paintings, Halley’s composition does not present an inherent equilibrium. Instead, Desperate Measures appears governed by a centrifugal energy, which produces an impatient and unfixed structure. As the eye roves across the canvas, looking, argues curator Rudi Fuchs, is a balancing act, governed by the disparate ‘systems of energy’ and chromatic schemas (R. Fuchs, ‘Accidental American Realism’, C. Reynolds (ed.), Peter Halley: Maintain Speed, New York, 2000, p. 97).
Halley’s visual language evolved gradually, and he was strongly influenced by the French poststructuralists, and by Jean Baudrillard and Michel Foucault specifically, whose writings he saw as key to unlocking modern society’s ‘obsession’ with geometric form (P. Halley, ‘The Crisis in Geometry’, Arts Magazine, June 1984, n. p.). Halley understands his rectilinear forms to be a refection of the contemporary ‘psychological condition’ within a subdivided, interconnected world (‘P. Halley quoted in J. Siegel, ‘The Artist/Critic of the Eighties, Part One: Peter Halley and Stephen Westfall’, Arts Magazine, September 1985, n.p.). Using colour and form as tools for refracting these systems of being and communication, in Halley’s Desperate Measures, a figurative reality is exposed and made real.
Halley’s visual language evolved gradually, and he was strongly influenced by the French poststructuralists, and by Jean Baudrillard and Michel Foucault specifically, whose writings he saw as key to unlocking modern society’s ‘obsession’ with geometric form (P. Halley, ‘The Crisis in Geometry’, Arts Magazine, June 1984, n. p.). Halley understands his rectilinear forms to be a refection of the contemporary ‘psychological condition’ within a subdivided, interconnected world (‘P. Halley quoted in J. Siegel, ‘The Artist/Critic of the Eighties, Part One: Peter Halley and Stephen Westfall’, Arts Magazine, September 1985, n.p.). Using colour and form as tools for refracting these systems of being and communication, in Halley’s Desperate Measures, a figurative reality is exposed and made real.