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Tinsquo's curatorial project, Adjacent To Life, presents Small Paintings by Peter Stankiewicz.
Peter Stankiewicz’s work presents visual art as a musical metaphor and the painted object as a contemplative realm.
Comprised of paint airbrushed onto plastic surfaces, these newest paintings further the artist’s exploration of color harmonies and color contrasts - and the moods each suggests. The works’ intimate scale invites inspection, offering the viewer a prospective field for the exercise of imagination.
The matte finish seems to draw the light (and, with it, the viewer’s eye) into the material, rather than keeping attention at the surface. Stankiewicz states that he prefers to use an airbrush “for the effects it can create: soft, diffuse or faded atmospheres and layers of color - and for the absence of any immediate trace of the human hand.”
While evidence of the painter’s hand may be veiled, the works convey an appearance of being acted upon by outside forces - such as weathering, oxidation and wear. This situates each work in a world whose aspect we are left to determine by the recording of its effects.
As images, the paintings depict the artist’s own foray into the same field for the exercise of imagination that he extends to the viewer. For Stankiewicz, this is a field of visual reward and particularities. He states: “I like dark colors, earth tones, the colors of rainy days, twilight, and the light before dawn. I like the colors of bricks, stones and wood, the various colors of the bark of the plane trees in the city, the colors of rusted steel.”
Small Paintings is on view through March 19 at the Adjacent to Life gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, New York City).
