(born in New York in 1953)
Adhesive Causality, 2010, signed and dated 2009 on the reverse, acrylic, fluorescent acrylic, and Roll-a-Tex on canvas, 203.5 x 208.5 cm

This work is accompanied by a photo-certificate of authenticity signed by the artist.
We are grateful to Peter Halley Studio, New York, for their assistance with cataloging this work.

Provenance:
Mary Boone Gallery, New York (acquired directly from the artist;
label on the reverse)
European Private Collection

Exhibited:
New York, Mary Boone Gallery, Peter Halley, 13 February - 20 March 2010

"The deployment of the geometric dominates the landscape. Space is divided into discrete, isolated cells, explicitly determined as to extent and function. Cells are reached through complex networks of corridors and roadways that must be traveled at prescribed speeds and at prescribed times. The constant increase in the complexity and scale of these geometries continuously transforms the landscape…
Along with the geometrization of the landscape, there occurs the geometrization of thought. Specific reality is displaced by the primacy of the model. And the model is in turn imposed on the landscape, further displacing reality in a process of ever more complete circularity."
Peter Halley, The Employment of the Geometric

Since the early 1980s Peter Halley has been working on the relationship between modern sign systems, space and subject. He is interested in spatial networks, in forms of communication and in the technoid systems of code surrounding people — be it streets and paths, television, telephone or the Internet — the turning into geometry of social space.

As a self-proclaimed “techno-sceptic”, he recognises the massive, power-laden networks that determine the individual through industrialisation and digitalisation, which bring with them a loss of control and freedom of decision. Because of his scepticism about the technological division of the world, which he perceives as a prison of perception, Halley calls his geometric colour fields “prisons” or “cells”. Entirely in the spirit of existentialism, the artist poses the question of human isolation and alienation in an impersonal, industrialised structure, for which he uses the allegory of the prison and the cell in his works. The oscillation between physical isolation and being connected by technological paths runs through Halley’s entire oeuvre.

While the early works represent a world in which a single channel leads to a single goal, the works of the 1990s and 2000s are dominated by rampant, uncontrolled channels in the spirit of postmodernism. Geometry plays the most important role as a structural element. Halley asks the question of the purpose for which geometric form has entered culture and why modern society is so obsessed with it that it builds and lives in geometric living worlds of increasing complexity and exclusivity. Halley’s pictorial theme is never the human figure. And yet it finds its way into his painting when this image is language — we speak of the brain as a “computer”, with us “recharging” or “hooking up” energy through it.

His work is a constructivist colour field painting, which compositionally plays with the relationship between mostly rectangular forms and the colour fields. As a third element, it expands its formal language to include different colour qualities and surfaces, for example by using neon and industrial colours that attract attention — as light advertisements do — or by adding sand or other particles. Halley thus integrates a three-dimensional relief into his works. Another essential characteristic of his works is the use of “roll-a-tex”, a kind of rough plaster used in the building industry for texturing walls.

Through the use of these industrial-commercial materials, Halley’s oeuvre has often been labelled with the keywords “minimal art” or “neo-geometric conceptualism”, which do not do justice to its culturally critical approach and enormous intellectual content. Rather, Peter Halley belongs to the most important painters of abstraction of his generation.