Matisse acrylic; Midnight Blue, Titanium White

Peter Adsett
Matisse Acrylic; Midnight Blue, Titanium White

When considering a title for this exhibition, the brand name of the acrylic paint Peter uses struck him as being quite apt; the simplicity of the colour names, “Titanium White” and “Midnight Blue,” reminding the viewer that abstraction has no external referent, no meaning beyond the materials and their operations on the canvas.

But the invocation of one of the great colour painters was also pertinent in a wider sense.  It was Matisse who famously declared black and white to be colours. Whilst making monochrome prints, he understood that black and white required the same treatment as colour, that the quality of both was achieved through modulation of quantity. This meant that blue, for example, had to be reduced or expanded in proportion to any colour in proximity – including black and white.  As he said, 

It is their quantitative relation that produces their quality

Students of modernism would be struck by the way Matisse, thinking in terms of surface-quantity relations, pre-empted abstraction.  Asked about his opinion of Matisse, Peter said, “I have entered his system, but played a different game.”  Necessarily, since Peter’s abstraction is not an art like a “comfortable armchair,” but rather, critiques a century of optically-based painting, demonstrating thereby that the eye is embodied, part of a whole organism with all its senses.

Here Peter talks about the surface of Number One, and the adjustments made to the quantity of black and white (dark blue reading as black in these canvases):

…  if there is a black square, it needs enough saturation to become impenetrable. Then, if a white line cuts through, it needs to have the exact degree of width to read as figure. But since I also want it to connect with the white rectangle on the right - which is a square lying beneath the black one - the white vertical has to read as ground. Furthermore, the edges need to be precise, either blurred or hard-edged, in order to activate that figure/ground shift.  I have extended that thinking across the surface of all four paintings.

Paintings of great complexity result from this ‘system,’ but the fourth, a series of black lines in a largely white surface, is the most subtle and difficult. Here, as with the previous three, the spectator is invited to take a transversal view that includes the edges of the support.  Thick black edges at both left and right imply a black surface, submerged beneath the white one. Because of Peter’s technique of letting the black and white logic work itself out through multiple alternate layers, there is, in fact, a black surface beneath! Being cognisant of this changes our view of the work entirely. 

This is an art in which surface relations are endangered to the point where one might legitimately ask, “is this painting? Was the advent of abstraction a century ago now, so radical, that the only way critics could conceive of it was as another genre of painting? Adsett replies, yes, this is not painting as we know it, but a way of thinking. Not, of course, like Conceptual art, which doesn’t require the object.  Rather, as a development of thought that could only be realised in paint.

– Text by Mary Alice Lee

Brief Biography

Peter Adsett was born in Turanganui-a-kiwa (Gisborne), Aotearoa NZ in 1959, settling in Australia in 1982.  He received a Diploma of Teaching from Palmerston North Teachers’ College, and a PhD in Visual Art from the Australian National University, Canberra. 

First exhibiting in 1989, Peter has been painting seriously since the mid 1980s.  For over a decade, he showed regularly with William Mora Galleries, then with Grantpirrie, and Kerry Crowley in Sydney.  In New Zealand he was shown with Peter McLeavey, and, more recently, with PAULNACHE through exhibitions, installations and projects throughout the Asia Pacific/Australasia regions.

His public exhibitions include the Drill Hall (ACT), Araluen (NT), Pataka Museum and Art gallery (NZ), and the Australian Consulate, New York.  Large scale works by Adsett are in the Northern Territory Museum and Art Gallery in Darwin, and in Araluen. The series Two Laws; One Big Spirit, painted in tandem with Dirrji (the late Rusty Peters), toured Australia and New Zealand, as well as the Netherlands, and was acquired by the Art Gallery of South Australia. 

In 2001 Adsett was awarded the prestigious Pollock/Krasner Foundation Grant, and undertook a six months’ residency at International Studio and Curatorial Program in New York. He exhibited at the Elizabeth Foundation Gallery (NY), and is a Fellow at MacDowell (formerly MacDowell Colony), New Hampshire, USA

His work is exhibited every year and is held in both private and public collections nationally and internationally.

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PAULNACHE/QUALITY

In collaboration with ___________quality___________ in Melbourne, we invite you to visit and view this new presentation across the months of October and November.

Location: Upstairs 1b Marine Parade, Abbotsford, Melbourne VIC

Click to view Exhibitions

Quality:
By appointment during the week
12-4pm, Saturday and Sunday
Runs until the 10th of Nov 2024

Acknowledgements

Artist: Dr Peter Adsett
Curation: Matthew Nache, Sophie Adsett, Felix Adsett
Photography: Felix Adsett
Text: Mary Alice Lee
Location: Quality, Melbourne VIC
Generously supported by: Little Brunswick Wines