Stephen Peirce or the Odyssey to Island-Universes
Rarely has a painter's universe been more haunting. Stephen Peirce's paintings seize your attention by the fixity of their perpetuum mobile, they open the white walls to a supernatural world by their ad infinitum repetition. Be it in small square canvases of 15x20 cm or on more than two meters, Peirce's work, in recent years and after having explored comic-like paths, has attained a state of calm infinity, succeeding in connecting extremes: it touches the intangible and contingent, it evokes the inside of the human body and mechanical residues, evokes molten material and mineralized organics, it takes you away to the vast spaces of galactic worlds while examining the biologically infinitely small.
But all these universes unfolding before us are examined with the same eyes, imagined with the same spirit, painted with the same brush. And again, on the surface of the canvas, extremes merge: the bold brush-stroke, the spreading of colour material do not prevent the optical precision of vision, the monochromatic shades of each painting, iridescent refinement of the pastel colour range , amble sometimes amongst pale pinks of spring roses and then to the fluid hues of blue of deep sea beds. In the same way, hand-sized no matter if the canvas takes in our hand or coinciding with the walls, every painting has the same strange ability to waft you away, transporting us on a journey beyond reality, while always bringing us back to the appearances of our existence.
A strangely human world
All objects represented in these supernatural visions form a landscape of recognized elements - and already the term object allows for investing of the "I" what could have been but neutral, but a thing. All these sublunary elements which seem to rise from the endless depths of space are somehow fundamentally human. Hence, Specimen is close to a robot’s face – with its eyes and antennae - and Model resembles a spinal bone concretion. And everywhere, phallic shapes stand out, soft or erect.
Another obsessive image in this fantasy world is that of the knot which occupies various titles, from Joints to The Spiral. In particular, the idea about rings wrapped around themselves in perpetual motion, even when fossilized by age or matter, is at the heart of various paintings. This idea is at the heart of various paintings, from Untitled 5 to Closed System. Raft, a large canvas where matter is perceived only through its ligaments, constitutes an intriguing representation of the same. Remaining with this idea of articulation, Scales might also be cited. It evokes a slate roof overlapping and Spur, a gigantic mandible of a sputnik designed to conquer the vacuum of outer space, but also Untitled 2, staring with two large dark eyes, such as spook fish risen from the abyss of the universe with a transparent skull, just without articulation.
Even the titles given by the artist and these forms, developed in the endless depths of the unconscious but carried on the surface of the canvas, make us think about human stories: no matter if it is about an anatomical feature (Three legged: with three legs), a feeling (Waiting: waiting) or a story (Giants: giants).
Substance is a landscape
In all of these paintings, an ambulatory connotation gives mobility in space to these objects that we believed immobile in universe, a mobility comparable to a shellfish. And this immobile ambulation is even more intriguing as the object itself is in an internal movement. Its material is often in flux or bears the traces of a metamorphosis, less in a poetic sense (Kafka) than in strictly biological terms. Specimen, which definitely lives up to its name represents a raw material, just like coming out of an underwater Titan Forge where each element, barely sketched, still matches imperfectly with the material it was aggregated to. At the other end of the chain, Emerald Tracery provides a smooth and fluid material, which solidified in two different ways, liquid rod or bone structure. But the bluish white shows, with two coatings, the unity of the materials.
Waiting shows the same two objects at different stages of the fusion of their constituents and Rose Mist is touching the eyes with that powdery material in full alteration. Everywhere traces of the slow metamorphoses of elements appear: Three Legged, completely damp, seems barely out of its chrysalis. Droplets explores the transformation of an object from a physical state to another. Solid state, liquid state up to a gaseous state with remnants of bubble formation, as revealed by multiple pores that dot the surfaces, as alive with a hidden strangeness of the material as the surface of the moon.
This impression of a changing world gives a space and time and re-injects a dimension of time to a world that seemed timeless, floating out of the rhythm of that time. The Giants, Untitled 6, as Rose Mist or Spur, but also Untitled 3 show a larval form, barely sketched, which stands inform in a spectral light, usually in the structure of rhizomes, a trace of early days of the universe. Scale or Valve make us attend to this work on the skin in a phase of exfoliation, or recovery of a material by another, in a moment of metal metamorphoses. But the result of all these avatars is a hybrid landscape, as uncertain as that of the origins. Closed System immerses us in a maze of ossified algae, which porous surface hasn’t breathed for millennia, where any notion of scale has disappeared: we imagine a purely aqueous world in the light of the moon.
Spur or Circuit evoke a residual landscape transfigured mechanical debris transfigured and crushed together by a UFO-ish light. Waiting reminds us that all notion of time evolution is unreal in this world that is beyond the laws of time, where we expect nothing and nothing expects us.
Inner journey
This coherence of the spectrum of the objects and of Peirce's universe is multiplied to infinity by its presiding unity of vision, a vision that is both scientific and fantastic, a vision that reverses the traditional relationship between the dominating observer and the observed object. Through the porthole of the canvas, each object appears as a phenomenon, but by the painters brush operating on the canvas, everything exists in its own self, revealed in its Dasein. The approach of all these objects is frontal, no matter whether they float in space or whether they are placed on a surface, as if, escaping the laws of gravity, pulling us into their state of weightlessness. Or rather, as if Peirce's paintings were openings to the real world, the world beyond the sublunary appearances of our everyday life. A representation of the island-universes surrounding the Milky Way, an odyssey beyond the solar system.
For if all these objects are highlighted, in particular by the discreet yet insistent play of shadow, there is no depth, or if there is one, then it is calculated by a unit of measure still unknown. Like fish for ocean divers, they seem very close to us, but yet are out of our reach. We cannot touch them but we see them intensely, because the optical acuity with which they are represented (or rather appear, and even exist ...) shows details invisible to the naked eye, and, generally speaking, what appears to be in the background is as accurate as the shapes in the foreground. And even if all these objects are illuminated, there is neither day nor night, nor even light source in this revealed and transfigured universe. Simultaneously very close and infinitely distant, these fantasy beings do not harbor any threat because we are immersed in a world of silence escaping the hazards of existence, the noise of life. These objects doubtlessly emit sounds, but we are reduced to contemplating them. A large part of their existence, of what they ARE, must escape our comprehension.
Thus, if Peirce magically magnifies the process of vision, reinforcing the painted object, he destroys the myth of Alberti's window or the power of the painting as a potential opening to decipher the world. Rather, we are here in Plato's cave, where we see passing ghosts of a universe which we can neither locate nor map nor hear but which is yet more present, more currently in existence, than the reality of our daily life. What if Peirce had reversed vision? What if the telescope had been turned around, revealing our innermost self without us realizing? What if he had us travelling - not in some random galaxy but in the convolutions of our brain, via a strictly but terribly human painting.
Olivier Bonfait, Professeur des Universités de Bourgogne, Président de l’Association des Professeurs d’Archéologie et d’Histoire de l’Art, Directeur de la Revue INHA
Stephen Peirce, the Explorer from Outer Space
"Strange pictures arisen from other worlds ... as if they had been created especially for you. It is imperative that you go to Estace. The rue Charlot gallery is small (this was before the gallery moved to Rue Beaubourg), but you'll see, Stephen Peirce's paintings and sculptures give it the dimensions of a universe."
And I almost missed it by a combination of chronic overload and laziness. Fortunately, my entourage pushed me so that I went to the gallery after the end of the exhibition, but first, when I got there, everything was still hanging.
And it knocked my socks off.
A world in unusual colors, at least in their encounter, filled with organic elements and mechanical debris which match as perfectly as the unexpected opposition of their colors. Arrangements that one might believe to be the result of incredible transformations in
a galactic discharge. Before I forget, an important detail which I think almost unprecedented in painting: Peirce's canvases have no edges. I mean to say that the eye extends them spontaneously into the elsewhere they open up to.
An apocalyptic world, perhaps, but largely an almost jubilant Apocalypse.
Here I must make a confession. I am a great lover of science-fiction, as well as a writer, editor and literary critic of this sometimes frowned upon and too often ignored specimen of literature. And if, of course, the surrealistic heritage Peirce recommends himself by does not escape me, I soon found it inadequate, even artificial. Firstly, surrealism enticed but few followers in Britain as if Breton's influence had never crossed the Channel. These stunning views almost immediately conjured up cover illustrations of specialized magazines, the famous pulps and of novels from the 1930s to the present day. Therein exists an entire universe too easily qualified as popular as if to get rid of it. And Peirce himself quotes Roger Dean.
As Régis Estace confirmed it to me, Peirce had been fascinated by this universe and had transcended it as a painter but possibly even more so by releasing it from its condition of narrative figuration. Strictly speaking, Peirce's paintings and sculptures of Peirce do not tell any story, do not need the support of a text. But one could just as well say that they call for a text.
Peirce cites Clark Ashton Smith (1893-1961), one of the most singular and most solitary characters of all American literature, who was also a painter and sculptor, and who gained the admiration ofHP Lovecraft.
The Tower, one of his greatest paintings, at least so far, reminds me of the extraordinary novel by Brian Aldiss, Hothouse (French title: Le Monde vert) situated in a future so distant that the moon has moved away from the Earth and seems so fixed in the sky that giant spiders have spun webs which connect the two worlds. One thinks also of JG Ballard and his cloud sculptors amongst other esthetic and decadent worlds. But Stephen Peirce work also make me think of the visions and monuments of the Scottish Iain M. Banks, one of the greatest writers of contemporary science fiction. Banks, recently deceased at the age of fifty nine will not have had the opportunity to discover it. But perhaps Peirce will read him.
I do not want to suggest that the work of Peirce, in his paintings, his wonderful little sketches and his sculptures, is of a literate nature. On the contrary, it is powerfully physical.
I have in front of me, right now in my office, just above my computer screen, Peirce's startling Chamber. By one of those coincidences that create encounters, even before the canvas found its place there, a large Japanese Pteranodon of carved wood had been hanging from the ceiling, swinging in the invisible breath of air. It now seems to spout right out of Chamber. I hope that one day Stephen Peirce will do me the friendly favor to come and examine it, together with his friend and accomplice Régis Estace.
A little further, on the same wall, a winding alien clamp scars a landscape shaped of infinite contours.
And then there is also this: Peirce likes tribal arts. Coincidentally, I love them too, and just below The Limb, some fallen Papua birdmen with graceful silhouettes and objects, wedding money, a large white ring carved into the shell of a giant font spread out. In a different spirit, they remind me the precious wood carved by my friend Jean-Christophe Couradin, forms of organic pebbles (galettes) that seem to have risen from outer space.
The african masks are on the floor above. I told you that I visit other worlds. In perfect disorder, that orderly disorder which I recognize in Peirce’s universe and which delights me. And perhaps worries me, too. Fortunately.
Gérard Klein, writer and publisher.
12/07/2013