Peter Stephens: Paris-Buffalo, 1900-2003
Peter Stephens’s 15 paintings and works on paper at Zolla/Lieberman are based on photographs that have a certain grandeur and are distanced by time: Eugene Atget’s turn-of-the-century documentations of France’s monuments and parks and painterly photographs by Wilbur Porterfield, an Atget contemporary who lived in Buffalo, New York. Atget 06-06 shows a grand outdoor stairway leading to an upper level where one imagines a promenade with cafes. Atget 01-03 depicts a park with elegant classical buildings (“the back side of the Medici fountain in the Luxembourg Garden in Paris,” Stephens says) and a curving walkway. Both compositions have a focused, almost theatrical intensity.
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But Stephens’s paintings are far from realistic copies. Starting with a rendering in ink mixed with shellac, he adds thin layers of acrylic to colorize the image faintly, oil stains to create greater density, and white streaks in transparent glazes to suggest a mysterious veil, then covers some areas with thick varnish, which adds the cracking found in old paintings. The distancing effect of these additions of course calls to mind Gerhard Richter, but whereas Richter questioned everything about the artistic enterprise even while reaffirming it, Stephens’s effort is more narrowly focused. Pale streaks and dark stains invoke time but also suggest some sort of disaster–in fact, a secretary in a law office where one of Stephens’s paintings had just been installed once reported with alarm that it had somehow been “ruined.”
Perhaps the most stunning work is the small portrait One More Time Around, in which the subject stares penetratingly, even frighteningly, at the viewer. This young woman’s long, wavy hair is again reminiscent of Christ portraits, but it’s less precisely painted than the beard in Schroer, and to good effect: while the woman’s magnetic gaze draws the viewer’s attention, the details of her appearance seem to melt away. Both Metcalf and Stephens offer uncertainties rather than answers, but where Stephens creates multiple levels of distance, Metcalf gives his subjects a disturbingly powerful presence.
