Memory Visible: Peter Drake’s “Re-picture”

Memory Visible: Peter Drake’s “Re-picture”
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Representational art immediately raises the question, representation of what? An intuitive answer is “representation of what the artist sees.” But this seemingly simple answer contains a wide variety of possible forms of sight: it may mean what the artist actually sees now, in the sense of a fleeting instant of light or motion – or what the artist sees under controlled studio conditions where a form holds its place and lighting over a long period – or it may mean what an artist knows exists, applying analysis atop direct sight – or a conscious idealization of a real scene to serve a thematic purpose, etc. To serve these many answers, a vast machinery of techniques and insights accompanies representational drawing and painting, contending with the optical and neurological properties of human seeing.

And yet even this apparatus addresses only the most basic question of how to make an image comprehensible as something one might see. Other answers to the fundamental question, representation of what? invoke other processes. One might answer, as Peter Drake answers in Re-picture, his solo exhibition at Linda Warren Projects, memory. One might represent memory. To make a painting represent memory is no simple thing. Any legible image could easily be mistaken for a picture of the present. So how does one fix the time of the image in the past, and not merely the objective past, but the past as perceived by a lost, younger version of oneself? Drake has synthesized an entire vocabulary of image and technique to serve this purpose.

First, of course, he has retreated into himself and identified which memories not only resonate with him, but stand a chance of communicating their quality to a viewer. We can know nothing of this process, except through the intensity and purity of purpose which they leave behind in the paint.

Second, he edits the terrain down to several sets of images. They are different from one another – saturated color advertisements, lurid but fuzzy television images, tin toys – and yet they all evoke a specific breed of American childhood: childhood in the suburbs of the 1950’s and early 1960’s.

Arrival, 2017, 56 x 76", Acrylic on canvas

Arrival, 2017, 56 x 76", Acrylic on canvas

Peter Drake/Linda Warren Projects

Then, within this set of images, Drake pursues two qualities.

One is the strangeness of the world as seen by a child. A child does not know which parts of a scene are important and which are not. His gaze roves irregularly, tracing both the most visually interesting details of a scene, and following a chain of hypotheses about which of those details unlocks the meaning of the scene overall.

Grass , 2017, 19 x 24", Acrylic on paper, sanded, on panel

Grass , 2017, 19 x 24", Acrylic on paper, sanded, on panel

Peter Drake/Linda Warren Projects

In Grass, as in many of the works on paper, we see a chance fragment yielded by a child’s ignorant, innocent gaze. At the same time, the image source is television, and Drake’s peculiar subtractive technique, accomplished by meticulously scraping away an initially dark surface, translates the shoddy television image beautifully to a new medium. Like mid-century television, it is low in resolution, and its values tend to cluster toward featureless darks and blown-out brights. The depth of field is shallow, with out of focus foreground and background objects dissolving into a harsh jumble of shapes. One can fairly hear the buzz of the broadcast.

Drake has thought a lot about marrying the defining qualities of the television image to the child-like sensibility revealed in the image chosen.

It's The Story, 2017, 40 x 50", Acrylic on canvas

It's The Story, 2017, 40 x 50", Acrylic on canvas

Peter Drake/Linda Warren Projects

In It’s the Story, he replicates the pastel cloud that surrounds and permeates each distinct region of color on old videotape, as well as the motion-blur transparency of the speediest objects seen in a paused frame of video. These artifacts situate the viewer clearly in a space of watching old television in hindsight. The pause button was not available at the time of the original broadcast. The color halos and motion blurs would have been subliminal.

However, the choice of frame recalls to us the mindset of the child who first saw this broadcast: no doubt an instant of an otherwise comprehensible scene, but children don’t conform their perception to the scene as written. They conform it to the telling moment, and that moment is idiosyncratic to each child. For Drake’s recalled child, familiar relations and actions dissolve and a jarring configuration emerges. There is a quality of the strange, of the menacing, to the moment the child fixes on.

This leads to the second quality Drake pursues in this body of work. If the first is the strangeness of the world as seen by a child, the second is the strangeness of that same world as considered by an adult. There is not only a child’s sense of menaced wonder in the frame selected for It’s the Story, but an adult’s bemusement, looking back, at the web of implications, innuendos, and absurdities which were invisible to the child.

This adult appreciation of an at-the-time overlooked absurdity comes to the fore in other works in the show.

People Stroking Their House I, 2017, 32 x 40", Acrylic on canvas

People Stroking Their House I, 2017, 32 x 40", Acrylic on canvas

Peter Drake/Linda Warren Projects

Drake’s take on the advertising of his childhood again evokes the qualities of media of the time, in this case magazine printing technology, with its distinct palette of blotchy, overstated color. The images he dredges up from the sleeping past are those which seemed reasonable enough to the child, and for this reason appear the most unbelievable to the adult as having ever been normal. Drake has identified a motif in advertisements: homeowners appreciatively stroking the new siding on their houses. This is a very strange image, and Drake makes the most of its degenerate silliness to imply a commentary on how easily unexamined motives and values can be corrupted, and gradually rot away a landscape of calm and plenty. Again, the subject is memory. This is memory as bitterness, as regret in having been raised to esteem the wrong things, until the right ones, which were once so abundant, fled all on their own.

This leads, more or less, to the most ambitious and surreal painting in the show, the gigantic Overlook.

Overlook, 2008, 89 x 117", Acrylic on canvas

Overlook, 2008, 89 x 117", Acrylic on canvas

Peter Drake/Linda Warren Projects

In this piece, the lessons of memory have been learned and applied. The contemporary clothes and strollers indicate that the scene has shifted from the past to the present. And yet the tropes of memory persist. The visual textures of childhood define the ability of the man to perceive. The grass and shrubs and trees retain a television brightness and vagueness. More troubling, the flames of the house fire appear as if diffracted through a phantasmagorical video lens. It is not a single cohesive fire, but a stuttering sequence of information packets, each describing its little realm, which together are meant, and fail, to add up to a representation of a fire. This is a painting of panic, of emergency, as perceived by a mind trapped in the cognitive biases laid down in its infancy. The other paintings in Re-picture reveal that mind excavating and acknowledging its past. This painting reveals that even once it is known, the past remains inescapable, that its magic and its tragic flaws come down all the way to the present.

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If you’re in Chicago, I cannot recommend enough that you go see this work in person. I had the good fortune to see it in Brooklyn. It looks good on a monitor, but its visual delight, its full technical sophistication, and its density and agility of concept are best appreciated in direct physical confrontation.

“Re-picture”

Peter Drake at Linda Warren ProjectsNov 11th, 2017 – Jan 13th, 2018327 N Aberdeen St.Chicago, IL 60607

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