peter booth: works on paper
07.02.26 - 28.02.26
Installation Images
Peter Booth: WORKS ON PAPER
“What's ultimately so impressive is Booth's ability to imbue his smallest drawings or most lyrical landscapes with a sense of mystery, and often dread.”
McDonald J, ( March 7, 2003), Art Column, Peter Booth
…
The Return of the Uncanny
Flaming rivers, figures, sun, and cactus are the subject of a Peter Booth drawing, among many. The narrative of his drawings is unclear, yet his subjects are familiar. The look of things and our familiarity with it returns in Booth’s drawings as un-homely, febrile, what Freud termed unheimlich - the uncanny.
Large insects, crashed planes and burning trees are Booth’s world as they are ours but until we have them back, we have no idea how to constitute them, as images. Startling as they may be, to view these early Booth drawings is to lean into a set of complexes and considerations that the artist is at pains to make. The drawings are not a predication for the artist; they are not ipso-facto the basis of any one painting but the ongoing daily ritual of drawing - Booth’s letting go of images.
From the dark, where light is at the edges, where flatness and abstraction were once Booth’s domain, comes a rush of subjectivity, the world suddener and nearer. No longer is this Booth’s speculation, an art measured by colour and form, it’s now a whirl of imagery, a new figuration that sears the body and does little to comfort the soul.
The vision runs hot as it does cold, and without any given location, it is a message that settles in the mind and turns from quiet despair to salvation but with stops and inevitable byroads. The key to Booth’s art is humanness and our innate fallibility, what Saul Bellow has called ‘faulty humanity.’ It is everywhere in the Booth’s landscapes and no less in the predicament of his characters, skewered as they are by their own subjectivity and alienation.
The landscape, Booth’s stage, its foreground and deep space, serve to give the characters breath. They are part Commedia dell'arte - part Beckett. His characters walk alone, sometimes in lines; they stumble and often fall, disappear, and inevitably rise with bloody noses and a rictus grin. If the subject is a portrait head, then the game is upped because the predicament is there in the upper torso and face. Imagine the role call, the MO of these heads, the sweetness of a tragedy well told and a story for another time.
Speculate then as to these drawings as they tumble forward, and inevitably, as a hot day proceeds rain, the pathetic fallacy of nature and feeling goes out the window. There is no surety as to outcome in an uncertain world, and Booth’s outlook, his prophetic practice, will always be essential. The fates await us all, and no less the characters in Booth’s world, where pleasure comes but not without some pain.
Brett Ballard
Brett Ballard is formerly Head of Art at Menzies Art Brands, Sydney. Prior to joining Menzies, Brett held the position of Senior Specialist, Art, at Sotheby’s Australia (Smith and Singer) for 10 years and was previously Gallery Manager at Rex Irwin Art Dealer in Sydney between 2003 and 2011. Brett works closely with clients, consulting on collection management and the buying and selling of art in the secondary market and at auction. He is an experienced curator who advises on all aspects of collecting both in Australia and abroad. Brett has published numerous articles and has written extensively on art for catalogues and exhibitions.
