Peter Halley
Direction
February 6–March 15, 2013
Opening Reception: Wednesday, February 6, 7-9pm
Mottahedan Projects
Al Joud Center, no.17
Sheikh Zayed Road
Dubai, UAE
Millennia ago in Mecca, the icon was rejected and idols broken. In what might be seen as man’s first monument of conceptual art, Al-Kaaba, Arabic for ‘The Cube,’ collapses the earthly and the sublime: its primordially simple shape extends the horizontal lines of the straight path through life upward into the vertical planes of spiritual transcendence.
Direction, an exhibition at Mottahedan Projects opening in Dubai on February 6, presents Peter Halley’s new series, Doorway and Conduit, centered on the architecture of the Kaaba. Fortuitously, 2013 serves as one century past the date Kazimir Malevich ascribed to his minimalist gesture, Black Square. Set against the bloody backdrop issuing from war and revolutions in both the East and West today, the works reveal history’s cyclicity. Time and time again, humanity has turned to an abstract object for ethical resolution: amidst the tyranny of the First World War, Malevich’s monochromatic masterpiece; and after the Second, Barnett Newman’s Stations of the Cross (1958–66).
In a world in which consumer choices increasingly define the self, the series Doorway and Conduit instead calls for a different type of individuation, that of belief. When confronting these images, the viewer must declare his/her stance vis-à-vis the subject. The status of the work as secular or spiritual changes accordingly. Caught in the constant swing of a pendulum of significance, the paintings participate in a Saussurian semiotic system that takes for granted the arbitrariness of the sign. Halley thus continues to apply semiotics to the quotidian sphere, a project he started in the 1980s alongside theoreticians like Roland Barthes. Furthermore, in turn, the artist fashions his own language: his oeuvre operates as a closed set of geometric forms that are manipulated to generate statements (i.e., paintings) in response to evolving psychological and cultural influences.
Halley’s paintings’ basic geometry composed of straight lines and right angles is at once alienating and inviting, beautiful and naïve. These paintings’ basic geometry of straight lines is at once alienating and inviting, beautiful and naïve. The series inverts the process of inside-out discovery that characterized Halley’s previous work: initially, the canvases appear to be all surface—depictions of an exterior wall and door—but their true subject is the spiritual expanse lying beyond that shell and within the self. In an application of anthropic mechanism, which asserts that the organic can be described in mechanical terms, Hallley’s automatist-style paintings stand as a metaphor for the modern individual. Their creation and viewing is rendered a reflexive act for the artist and audience, respectively. With the doorway figuring as the heart of the work, the painting is reformulated as a representation of the self and a mirror.
These works are beguiling. Touches of Day-Glo colors among a predominantly subdued palette of gray and muted black lend a luminosity reminiscent of the spirituality they symbolize, yet with a brightness that rings hollow. Following predecessors like Andy Warhol, Halley utilizes a style that seems supremely doable. However, even as he blurs the line between the artist and the viewer, the philosopher and the common man, the works remain hieroglyphic to those unfamiliar with the theory and politics in which they find meaning. In a self-conscious performance, Halley’s paintings engage in the inaccessibility they criticize. They entrap us as they liberate us, cynically intimating that we cannot live outside society’s boxes of control while optimistically providing us with the tools to break free.
In this latest iteration of a practice based on exposing the underlying structures and limitations imposed by our modern world, Halley respects a principle expressed by the artist Carl Andre: that in the short span of our lives, accomplishing one task is enough. The conduit, an important element in Halley’s paintings that in earlier works represented a means by which to connect individuals, now references a transcendental relationship. Providing a foundational standard around which the work is structured, the conduit also symbolizes the direction according to which a life might be ordered—the right path stretching beyond the doorway to emancipation.
Directions: Street 4B, exit 43 off Sheikh Zayed Road. Take a right off the exit onto Al-Manara followed by the first right and again another right; the gallery lies to the left of the following intersection.
