October 2013
PETER SHMELZER / NEW PAINTINGS
NEVER ALONE
October 4 – 28, 2013
Vernissage Friday October 4 / 7 – 10pm
NEVER ALONE
New Paintings by Peter Shmelzer
Representation is the ultimate form of control.
How are ‘truths’ cultivated, and to what degree can they be turned on their head, against their historically conventional terms?
Peter Shmelzer has spent a career making oil paintings of the human form in extreme physical and emotional states. His works operate in a rhetorical space that both interrogate representational power, and celebrate the possibilities it offers.
The rhythm of each of Shelmzer’s painting series, and to be sure, his entire oeuvre, builds on this duality of what is and what is given. Fragments of cultural memories, mutated bodies, transposed environments and bizarre incidents begin to seem as though they belong. What start as fields of seemingly dislodged subconscious iconography develop with a sense of place and purpose – a logic, language and constitution.
Behind this distinct conceptual approach stands a technical mastery of the medium – Shemlzer’s hyper realistic figures, forms and environments work on a material and conceptual threshold of what can be achieved in painting. The sincerity in which Shmelzer presents his subjects and models remains as the binding agent that holds his visions together. There grows in the works a kind of lived presence– a feeling of never being alone when you are alone.
Peter Shmelzer was the first artist to exhibit at La Petite Mort Gallery and his Cialis work has been featured every October since the gallery opened its doors. In each of these exhibitions LPM gallery presents a unique, fresh series of Shmelzer’s works – the diversity of which speaks to the artist’s ever-expanding line of vision and his commitment to the craft. As such, Shmelzer has given the gallery a continual and immeasurable sense of direction and identity. This exhibition, the tenth installment of its kind, acts as a celebration of the collaborative.
The question continues to be, how do we continue to create the exposure for this mega-talent. Although Shmelzer has achieved great local success and exhibited in major art centres across Canada and internationally, there is more work to be done.
Artist’s Statement:
In this new show, the paintings have all the hallmarks of the formal portrait: each work features a single figure in a domestic setting, surrounded by paraphernalia that appears to provide insight into their character. However, in these paintings the artist has altered the subjects’ environments and, in fact, their physiology, to suggest a new and manufactured identity and history for each. Commissioned portraits have historically granted power to the subject to carefully select environments and objects to be included in the image that would present their character to the world in a specific (typically positive) way; in this show, that control has been assumed entirely by the artist who may be as capricious or as absurd as he desires.