John Peart’s show at Watters Gallery is a demonstration of what you might call ‘painters logic’. That’s a painter making a mark on a canvas and then asking themselves “what next?” The logic is the next line, the next gesture, the next colour. You can tell just by looking at a lot of older painter’s work that the logic gets solidified into a series of rote gestures that, while pleasant, aren’t progressing anymore, they’re just circling around the same thing over and over.
Courtesy of the artist.
Peart has been on the move, perpetually it seems, since the 1960s, going back and forth, patterns, no patterns, gestures, micro tonalities, big splashes, back to the start and around again. Some people suggested that there’s no such thing as a “Peart painting” and maybe there isn’t, but sometimes you get this idea in your head about what an artist does and when you see it, you think, yeah painting! It was like that when we went down to the concrete edifice that is Watters Gallery for Peart’s show of big paintings. They sure looked like his work to us and found those lines, colours and layered screens that we associate with the whole John Peart experience.
But curiously, after looking at the show and liking the Palette Paintings a lot, we went back and had a peruse through the 2003 exhibition images and realised that they were much different. Shurley shome mishtake? The move from one show to the next was phenomenal and, realising we’d come in late, we did further research. Peart’s latest work seems resolutely old school and somehow more so when compared to that last body of work and we wonder with some incredulity if had really been that way all along? To be that adventurous, to be that questing and forward thinking with each new show must be just suicide commercially but absolutely inspiring to see.
