October 2008
PETER SHMELZER / New Paintings
One Month Exhibit / Oct 3 – Nov 2, 2008
Vernissage Friday Oct 3 / 7 – 10pm
Got Love? / New Paintings by Peter Shmelzer
This show explores one simple theme: the inevitability of love in the face of all the evils arrayed against it.
“I wanted to paint people enveloped in each other, connected and inseparable. I felt if I could convey the depth of interdependence we experience, then I could illustrate the sameness of us all and through that, the absolute necessity for co-operation. How can we hope to be happy when we are surrounded by misery and deprivation? I wanted to paint pictures about these ideas, about the need for everyone to understand their collective responsibility to everyone else. Love, Peter”
Come see this show — it will make you feel good inside.
Artist Statement:
“I see visual art as a method of measuring and reflecting the world and our place in it. Like the written or spoken word, it is a system for elucidating that which evades our immediate understanding. There is a contemporary compulsion to impose trends and to forecast even the most ephemeral and unpredictable of things through the endless collection of data. Though this has yielded great social/scientific/
I have tried, in my work, to create a mythological vocabulary outside of traditional religious or historical systems. Characters are set outside of identifiable context (they cannot be placed in time or located in a particular culture) but their faces are real, familiar, human faces that may remind the viewer of a neighbour or a friend (though, admittedly, gone terribly wrong). The primary aim is to evoke an emotional response and, then, to allow the viewer to speculate on the narrative. Why are these people here? How did they get this way? What are they doing to each other?
Thank you,
Guy Berube, director
La Petite Mort Gallery