Christopher Peterson
September 5 – October 5, 2024
Satchel Projects is delighted to present Equipoise, an exhibition of recent works by Christopher Peterson, on view from September 5 through October 5, 2024. This will be the artist’s debut solo show in New York. An opening reception will be held on Thursday, Sept 5 from 6–8 PM.
Christopher Peterson creates paintings that are both materially rich and pictorially evocative. An artist with a longstanding practice, Peterson has developed a taxonomy of forms that allude to symbolic as well as painterly languages. While remaining firmly rooted in abstraction, these works contain intimations of natural and constructed systems, landscape and the built environment.
Is a circle the moon, the sun, or simply a circle?
The term Equipoise can mean equilibrium as well as counterbalance, or balance-in-tension. Peterson’s paintings possess an energy that stems from internal tensions – between structure and dynamism, the pictorial and the concrete, the pastoral and the geometric. Positive and negative space flips; the point of a triangle gently touches the curve of a circle. Repeated shapes align themselves in loose, rough grids, suggesting glyphic language systems. These works can also evoke music, with its rhythmic passages and transitions – a fuzzed-out blur against a hard, abrupt edge – gentle harmonies in contrast with sharp dissonances.
Peterson’s process begins with cut pieces of canvas or coarse burlap and other available materials, onto which paint has been layered, scrubbed, sprayed, dotted and brushed. These pieces are brought together on a toned surface, which becomes a field of play/action/interaction. One move builds upon another in a process of that is sometimes deliberate, sometimes spontaneous. Accident is embraced. The shapes are layered, moved, rotated, flipped, covered-over, and added-onto, until resonant and evocative relationships start to emerge. Peterson follows the process where it leads him, up to the moment when a painting has a fully-realized presence.
Temporally slippery, the paintings in Equipoise relate as much to current abstraction as they do to Egyptian cuneiform and art brut. They can be seen in relation to a constellation of artists including Howard Hodgkin, Louise Nevelson, Paul Klee and Gillian Ayres, as well as Adolph Gottlieb’s early pictographic paintings.
Ultimately, Peterson’s works are distinctively, unmistakably his own. He is an inventor of a visual language that is simultaneously symbolic, concrete, and emotional. He has described his paintings as “objects that act in the world, infused with meaning -- but not literal meaning.” The openness of this formulation, as embodied by the work, allows viewers a space to wonder, to ponder.
Born in Lancaster, PA, Christopher Peterson currently lives and works in central Virginia. Peterson’s work was most recently featured on mepaintsme.com. Exhibitions include Hotel Michel in Margate, UK; Tappeto Volante in Brooklyn, NY; Tourist in White River Junction, VT; and PS122 in New York. Peterson received his BFA from University of the Artis in Philadelphia, PA.