Aligning with the walls:
Peter Mohall or the Homecoming of the Smooth Criminal
Property is fundamentally artistic because art is fundamentally poster, placard. (…) What does a matter do as matter of expression? It is first of all a poster or placard, but that is not all it is. It merely takes that route.
Gilles Deleuze
The paintings of Peter Mohall are striking spectacles. As if looking into a hyper- hologramatic dream of reality, one finds a world of leftover imagery that seems to be living a life of their own, somewhere deprived of gravity. Fractal Figuration is Mohall’s new project dealing with painting in a metaperspective of the old battle of presentness and opticality. Although the lacerated posters points to décollage and Nouveau Réalisme, it is encountered by a slick brush set out to both confirm and distort the word of appearance.
Whether you lean to their figurative basis or place the works in the realm of impure abstraction, the paintings affirm Mohall’s interest in the motif’s deconstructive ability to relate to abstract imagery. Just as interesting is how he uses photography as the ocular grab of painting. He addresses a somewhat hypertensed discourse of painting in simply watching it display on, say, a poster wall. In this respect there would be no painting to actually create, you would simply have to notice how it already appears in real life. One could watch the painterly events as they bind and resolve, maybe like watching molecules form, detach and regroup. Endless watching, endless events and configurations in a turmoil of a fractured, but still infinite flatness. To get a better understanding of this new project, one could track Mohall’s own route to an abstraction somewhat surprisingly addicted to reality. Or a reality addicted to painting. Or a painting addicted to the wall.
The recent works goes back to a couple of paintings that Peter Mohall made in 2007, shortly after having allocated a new and freshly improvised studio. As he found himself surrounded by the composite wood boards (OSB), which made up the walls, he noted their hypnotic effect (it is really hard not to), a cross-oriented structure creating a characteristic collage-like optical turmoil.
He, then, shot some detailed close-ups to use as drafts, restricted the palette to shades of green and executed the paintings with a Gerhard Richter-sense of blurred photorealism. The outcome canvases gave an impression of a wild, lush forest, something close to a jungle. The woods seemed to have resurrected, so to speak, as brought back from a fraction within itself. Somewhat ironically, this was displayed through the most toxic paint available. As both were entitled Studioview, one could argue whether Mohall is a “green artist” or not, but he definitely deals with some sense of environmental aspects, namely his studio and how it relates to an exterior world called in by the means and conditions of painting. In short, there is an inside and an outside with a wall dividing them, and a painting that tares them down in the attempt to mediate the perceptions of space and opticality.
In response, Mohall started a new and still ongoing series of paintings called Faux Bois (“fake wood”). The title refers to the traditional craft of imitating wood grain, but instead of imitating expensive, hard or exotic types of wood, Mohall utilize the OSB. The Faux Bois-paintings are initially set up in the same way as mentioned above, but in this case Mohall “replaces” chosen parts with an often wide range of alien colours. By doing so, he is able to recompose and improvise within the already fixed chart, within the structural patterns of the composite walls. In result, these chosen areas, these abstract “wood grains” or fragments, optically seem to elevate from what then becomes the background – formerly known as a studio wall.
As one return to the Fractal Figuration, it now becomes evident that we are exposed to some exterior version of the prior works. One wall seems to have been replaced by another. Instead of keeping within the mainframes of an enclosed studio-based environment, he is taking it out on the streets. (Of course, inevitably ending up spending even more time in his studio – it seems hard to escape.)
Still, this marks a radical shift in how to handle the material. The gaze cools off, so to speak, while studying the already hypertensed visuality of the outside world. What could appear to be a figment of imagination in the Faux Bois series becomes a property of the external in Fractal Figuration. It is simply de-picted, and we are now facing the spectacles of big red ants, strips of coloured paper, broken slogans and what not. There seems to be few limits in what makes up a motif. Any imagery goes once having appeared on a poster-wall or such. The photographic drafts, whether found on- or off-line are not manipulated other than through selection and how they are cropped to find some particular interplay between the fractures, rifts and leftover imagery.
The paintings, then, seem to encounter their gestural aspects as meta-expressive. Not only as photographic ”evidence”, but also by being executed somewhat accordingly. Furthermore, the depicted material, the posters, is in itself mechanically reproduced and spread as printed matter, already a distance from some ”presentness” of modernist features. One could of course point to the torn, lacerated paper, as to a bodily outline of the pictorial bits and pieces, but your finger would only reach a thin layer of paint.
So maybe we could rephrase Greenberg and present a poster-painterly abstraction. At least, Peter Mohall deals with some painterly events as they are found and appeared in their full frontal. The logic seems straight and concise: You only need to pick up a camera to flash the party. But still, Mohall does not play good pop or bad pop, nor is he pushing an ironic gesture. Even if the party once did come to an end, it seems as if we have to leave the human terrain to discover its afterlife down at some viral, autoerotic order of visuality with no actual figure or body to manifest.
Peter Mohall brings to the table some of the, if you will, perversities of painting, some of its fetishized properties of modernist discourse, but he is first and foremost indebted to both Gerhard Richter and Glenn Brown. The use and understanding of photography would obviously route back to Richter, but the question of corporality – as in the case of Brown – is close to antithetic. The paintings of Peter Mohall are no doubt dealing with the eye that sees the world as painterly, but they do so at the point where these retinal events mysteriously erect as flat. The world comes forth as the very apparatus of painting itself, leaving only a question of re-finding it.
However, finding something means framing it – in its double sense. It means that you have done an extraction, or else you would have no it to find. So if the Duchamp legacy were walking this earth carrying a really heavy index finger, then painting would probably be a pair of aching eyes. The paintings of Peter Mohall highly reflect this awareness. One can subscribe this to some existential core or simply label it as an interesting way of composing pictures. Let us assume both. And let us assume that one must not tell lies. Any cropping means that you left something out, and the penalty can be serving lifetime in art trying to get the big picture. Peter Mohall somehow gets the picture. Once you get to the wall, you get to a painting, and behind this painting you might get to a wall that practically begs to be painted. Lieber Maler, male mir.
text by Tommy Johansson