| Essay
from Michael Brenson
Vita
Petersen's new paintings are like pages from the journal of
an artist who has spent a lifetime in her studio, each day
looking and exploring, listening to what was trying to speak
in this line and that shape, this color and that constellation.
Some of her forms are quiet -- staring or sitting alone. More
are in motion, with an occasionally anxious but usually confident,
even frenetic energy. They assemble and meet, tumble and spin.
Even in shocked immobility or reverentially still, they seem
busy. Petersen's line has a marvelous assurance and suppleness.
It demarcates and displaces, asserts or retreats. It can swing
into the arc of a hummingbird's flight, or harden into an
oar or pole, or the armature of a chair or table. Her passages
and fields of color have fluid identities as well. They can
have a prayerful stillness; they can coalesce and thicken,
and, like a watchful parent, stand above the animation in
their midst; they can squeeze around and between the fragmented,
even broken, yet oddly complete forms, locking them in.
Memory
has an irrepressible, almost physical force here. Everything
Petersen has lived and seen seems to want to gather and act.
These paintings are alive with people and talk, flowers and
fires, cooking and planting, dinners and dreams. Most of all,
they are permeated with conversations. The passionate discursiveness,
as well as the heavily psychologized silences, in many European
drawing rooms before World War II can be felt in these paintings'
hints of Old World interiors. They speak, too, of a lifetime
of internal exchanges with Vuillard, Bonnard, Nolde and Matisse.
And of decades of actual exchanges with Hofmann, Gorky and
de Kooning, and with many other artist friends, who, like
her, helped transport the textures of modernist Europe into
postwar America. And with Pollock -- whose meteoric rise and
fall Petersen witnessed -- who brought into the fabric of
European art a particularly American restlessness and reach.
These and a myriad of other voices seem to press into these
paintings, to come at them from all sides, and to flow not
only into them but also beyond them, evoking not just these
voices’ traditions and histories, but also a future
large enough to contain them. It is rare to come across paintings
in which the past demands the future and memory produces hope.
In which the intensely personal is also intensely social.
In which a multitude of intimacies and stories re-emerge as
invitations to begin.
|