Kilmorack Gallery, until 22 April 2011

FOLLOWING his highly successful collaboration and exhibition with poet Jon Miller at an talla solais, Ullapool, last August 2010, Peter White’s current solo show at Kilmorack Gallery presents the viewer with a typically beguiling combination of presence and absence within the same frame. Distilled into a series of iconographic objects, the art of Peter White evokes meditative stillness, the seeming emptiness of vessels such as bowls, books, hats or garments transformed by the artist’s rendering into objects of spiritual contemplation.

Peter White's Garment 2

White’s palette is characteristically subtle and coolly ethereal which makes light and warmth all the more luminescent when it does appear. Garment 1 (Mixed media) is a particularly beautiful example, the arms of the empty shirt outstretched like a prophet, tonally lit from within. The visual draw of this composition is to the centre of the image where the human heart should be, a space glowing like embers, the whole form suspended on a ground of the deepest ultramarine. The two dimensional painted surface itself is also illuminated at the edges, the panel rendered as symbolic as the treatment of the subject.

Absence of physical human form also creates a powerful presence in Hat 4, the skull cap hovering delicately, defining the space where a human head should be. The intimate, childlike scale of this work is poignant for it suggests mindfulness rooted in age rather than infancy, an object evocative of time and therefore of mortality in relation to the human condition.

White’s treatment of the human head throughout the exhibition is cerebral rather than personal; on an intimate or monumental scale the artist’s heads feel less like portraiture and more like Everyman. Heads 1-9 in graphite all look directly at the viewer as if through a veil of chiaroscuro, framed in isolation on dark grounds. Although they display individuality in variations of features, they feel very much like a chorus proclaiming the artist’s vision. These heads, like the objects depicted throughout the exhibition, are removed from their earthly context and hover like visions out of darkness or dreams.

Peter White's Garment Triptych

There is something inherently spiritual, yet completely non-denominational, about White’s imagery. In Garment Triptych (Mixed media 250cm x 130cm) his use of three panels and the empty garment, arms outstretched, immediately suggests the crucifixion, albeit with an absence of flesh and blood. A series of strips of cloth, each arranged emblematically on a variety of dark grounds feel as if they are details plucked from the art of medieval Germany or Flanders, with their religious motto or heraldry removed, blank, fluttering and suspended, each contained within their own dark space. The build up of the painted surface in mixed media feels like the accumulation of ages, particularly in the tar like background of Strip 10, the white illumination of an inanimate object recalling portraiture and figurative work of the Northern Renaissance.

Peter White's Bowl 2

There is a sense in which all of White’s objects become humanised, presented on panels in isolation and held aloft for contemplation; layers of wax and pigment are painstakingly crafted, contours of form and surface patina almost sculptural in their rendering. Garment 2 feels as though it is a panel wrought in bronze, steeped in aqua, blues, greens and russet, a diffuse palette, evocative of the effect of weather and the elements on metal, yet visually suspended as if seen underwater. The surface of the painting is alive with texture, and this attention to detail, the crafting of the image, is what makes White’s work so distinct.

Peter White’s latest solo show displays with insistence the artist’s unique vision but there is also variety in terms of subject matter and scale, creating a fluid dialogue between figurative, still life and landscape genres. White’s enigmatic work is beautifully crafted throughout, a perfect synthesis of technique and ideas.

© Georgina Coburn, 2011

Links

• Kilmorack Gallery