PAINTINGS

SELECTED PIECES

    CLICK SERIES TITLE • THEN CLICK PAINTING
  • WALKIN' NY
  • THE WALL
  • DON'T SHED NO TEARS
  • GOOD TIMES
  • ERASURE

ART MEDIA

PUBLISHED EXCERPTS



"Denis Peterson earned a Painting MFA at Pratt Institute where he was awarded a prestigious Teaching Fellowship. He taught lifesize figure drawing at Pratt and exhibited his early New Realist paintings in New York City while restoring 16th and 17th Century Flemish museum pieces. Among the earliest Photorealist painters to emerge in New York, Peterson displayed groundbreaking airbrushed figurative paintings he aptly named Soft Focus Realism in a premier Photorealist exhibition celebrated at the preeminent Brooklyn Museum."

"Peterson later pioneered a splinter movement of Photorealism that had idealized and fetishized icons of contemporary culture in detached, and at times, banal frameworks. Abandoning its traditional aesthetic conventions, he named his newly formed painting genre Hyperrealism, accentuating commodification of cultures in alternate realities."

"It is not only hierarchy of the arts that this artist intends to upset, but real social paradigms. These socially conscious paintings are products of an extraordinary labor of compassion - his work centers on the indefatigable human spirit. A radical painter, Peterson's compelling virtuosity addresses the timeless human condition with precision and dignity."

"Painters like Richard Estes, Denis Peterson, Audrey Flack and Chuck Close often worked from photographic stills to create paintings that appeared to be photographs. Peterson's work conveys a sense of inwardness and refective self-consciousness, differs from the idealising, more deadpan aspect of figures in Photorealism who appear either fetishistic or as mere individuals in the urban scene. They are simply deserving of having their likenesses recorded as any famous persons, and more importantly, of having their humanity recognized."

"It was no longer enough to just secure the painting as a realist object i.e., mundane objectified themes, banal subjects, or staged settings. Each series of works was a visual excursion through a range of societal norms incorporating an existential frame of reference as an alternate reality: the human condition. Compelling images confronted the ordered and the disordered, the connected and the unconnected. As a counter culture school of painting, my visual statements (albeit provocative) challenged our comfortable sensibilities of reality, verisimilitude, perception and illusion." --Peterson

PUBLICATION SOURCES: Art: The Whole Story Thames & Hudson Publishers 40,000 Years of Creativity Rizzoli Publishing Denis Peterson Wikipedia Artists of Photorealism Art Story 20th Century American Culture Edinburgh Press Paris/Brussels Auctions Pierre Bergé Associés Photorealism National Galleries Scotland Fascination with Reality – Hyperrealism Museum of Modern Art CZ Hyperrealism Catalog

CRITIQUE

ART EXHIBITIONS

DIALOGUE

INTERVIEW PART 1

This casual conversation during a dinner meeting with a prominent gallerist at Le Bernardin in NYC regarding The Wall LA painting exhibition led to gallery representation.

When did you start painting?

At the age of four, I would sit in my grandfather's painting studio and he would take a piece of paper; crumple it up and hold it to the light while turning it. He would ask me what I saw as it cast a moving shadow on the drawing paper he had laid out before me. Then he would challenge me to draw and paint what I saw...an imagined face, hand, bird, etc.

So, you would draw these objects all the time?

No, each time I saw something different. It helped me develop my imagination and creativity at a very early age...my introduction to hyperrealism before its time!

Why was he so interested in you learning drawing and painting?

I guess he saw my creative nature and desired to pass on his incredible talent and expertise in art. He restored works by Rembrandt and other renown painters for the Metropolitan Museum. He taught me the art of restoration whereby restoring Renaissance paintings carried me over during and after my post-military college years. He was a young atelier painter in France where leading Impressionist painters i.e. Monet were among his colleagues. While watching me paint, he would cite stories about them and how they openly disparaged the norms and espoused "no rules in art".

No rules?

They were true explorers of artistic revolution, always willing to experiment in genre, subject and technique. Therefore, I was always encouraged to find new ways to express myself in art as well as to uncover novel out-of-the-box solutions for problems indigenous in every medium. All the visual restrictions i.e., the rule of thirds, aerial perspective, sources of light, depth of field etc. were worth breaking through as well.

Is the social dynamic or the aesthetic of more importance?

They are inseverable. If the piece cannot stand on its own merits as a work of art, if it doesn't lend itself to further art history even in one small step, if it has already been done; then either I don't do it or the doomed underpainting falls onto the growing scrap heap of discarded canvasses in my already cramped studio. All my work imparts sociological implications which I have personally explored and wish to convey unexpurgated to the viewer, regardless of the viewer's preconceptions.

So that is why you developed hyperrealism and named it a school of art?

I didnt develop it. Although at first, I did think so. It wasn't until I was painting hyperreal works for a few years that I found other hyperrealists around the world. Perhaps in this country there were none among the working photorealists attempting hyperrealism as a breakaway from photorealism in any case.

So in that sense, I may have had something to do with promoting a new way of looking at what I, or some of us, were doing. Some were closer to social surrealism, others narrative realism and so on. But hypererealism has room for as many artists and individual offshoots as any other legitimate school of art.

But you named it a school of art?

Yes, while studying the existential works of Jean Baudrillard who had popularized the term hyperreal. I was floored the first time I read him. It was if I had been living this approach in my paintings but never had the means to express it anywhere as succinctly as he did. I had grown tired of photorealist work as to its banality and unflinching position against any meaningful narrative in art. As a photorealist, it seemed logical to adapt the ideology to my individual painting style, hence the term hyperrealism painting was born. I began to incorporate both the name hyperrealism and its derivative philosophy into my photorealist paintings. Sadly, Baudrillard died the following year.

His philosophy of alternate realities and simulated images were in part based upon semiotics, a body of esoteric work compiled by Charles Sanders Pierce and based on his own studies of Kant, another favorite of mine. He wrote about representation versus conscious experience, visual stimulations as signs, and interpretation of signs as icons; all of which I readily identified with.

And that labyrinth of mirrors is no small difference. (continue to PART 2)

SALES AND MEDIA INQUIRIES

PAINTINGS/EXHIBITIONS/COMMISSIONS/SIGNED PRINTS




MARK GALLERY - New York
mark-gallery@optonline.net
GALERIE RIVE GAUCHE - Paris
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PIERRE BERGÉ & ASSOCIÉS - Paris
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THOMAS PAUL FINE ART - Hollywood
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PAINTING STUDIO - New York
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