18 March - 12 April 2003
Peter Adsett
Polychrome Poison
Press Release
Catalogue Essay
Images
Artist CV
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Peter Adsett has been exhibiting nationally and internationally for the last fifteen years. This is Adsett’s first solo show in Sydney. Adsett has spent time over the past ten years living and working within indigenous communities, and generating such projects as Two Laws, a collaboration between himself and Rusty Peters. Two Laws is touring Australia and is currently on exhibition at Hazelhurst Regional Gallery.
Polychrome Poison challenges the artist’s hitherto hidden and subversive use of colour by achieving the same game of recessive and dominant illusion with stark and poisonous colours. The slick layering of vitriolic green and red, which make up his perceptual black, separates candy shades of pink, yellow, green and orange. The overall effect is both disturbing and alluring, forcing the viewer to question the relationship and difference between eye candy and art.
"I didn't want figure and ground to be integrated. Instead, the paintings do violence to the notion of integration, which is a form of assimilation. I want to make the reconciliation of opposites impossible. We desperately want black to signify black, so that it retains its opposition to white. But in my work black acts as white. I want to show that another model can exist which is not binary or static. My black undercuts the perceptual logic of painting as an illusion. I go off the space of painting to create another space, but that space can’t be located."
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