Blind Pass Peter Halley

Peter Halley is one of the outstanding exponents of the American trend known as Neo-Geo. In his art, he takes the sublime traditions of colour field painting (Barnett Newman) and post-painterly abstraction (Frank Stella, Kenneth Noland) and places them in the context of contemporary visual culture and (industrial) design. The painting entitled Blind Pass is a form variant of a broader series. In the work, the basic concepts of Halley’s iconography are evident: stripes of colour that can be interpreted as soil sequences, colour fields that may refer to a reduced landscape (the black, “night-time” sky, a block-like building), windows like those in a prison, fluorescent surfaces, and systems of bands like a drain cover. The dark, nocturnal colours and the interplay of light and shade, as Halley has indicated, are remote allusions to the common features of metaphysical painting, as though Halley was heralding the decline of metaphysics and metaphysical painting, and the associated theoretical and art historical dilemmas.