Winston Wächter Fine Art, New York is pleased to announce an exhibition of new paintings by artist Peter Waite. Waite’s large-scale acrylic panels explore the intersection of personal and social memory as it is played out through travel and tourism. Working from sketches, photographs and his own memory, Waite creates simultaneously realistic and impressionistic renderings of sites he has visited.
re:locations features works based on the artist’s trips to Seattle, New York, Rome and Perugia. Instead of depicting popular vistas, Waite’s focus here is on passageways, stairs and escalators –- spaces that denote movement from one location to another. A painting of a foyer in the Vatican centers on a closed door at the end of the corridor, calling attention to a dictated path though public space. Other works place the viewer at the top of an escalator or the bottom of a staircase landing, settings that evoke the transience of travel or anticipate an unknown destination.
For the past decade, Waite has worked with fluorescent lines of color, “zips,” that shoot across the surface of his paintings like laser beams or gamma rays. In his most recent compositions, Waite has expanded the use of fluorescent color, priming the surface of his panels with neon pinks, oranges, blues and greens. This vibrant underpainting pops out at the edges of the works, lending a tone of struggle and contrast between the unnatural base and the representational image constructed above. The images glow, as though the synthetic color is threatening to bleed through and take over. The act of seeing what is directly in front of us is challenged by the encroaching color, reminiscent of film stuck and burning in a faulty projector. Memories, both the artist’s and the viewer’s, hum under the surface of these paintings, creating a passage to be mentally transported.
For more information, contact Amanda Snyder at (212) 255-2718.
