Painting empty spaces

By ROBERTA SMITH

Peter Waite
Edward Thorp Gallery

Peter Waite's seventh solo show in New York is a human allegory devoid of humans, painted in a button-down realism that brings to mind some unexpected blend of early 80's representation -- say, Mark Tansey, Troy Brauntuch and Eric Fischl. The results don't break ground, but they're decidedly affecting.

Mr. Waite favors quietly oppressive images of empty institutional spaces, places not too pleasant to be in: board rooms, operating rooms, offices, a jury box, prison cells, an execution chamber and long views of prison hallways and cellblocks, including a particularly decrepit and daunting view of Eastern State Penitentiary, in Philadelphia, lately featured in the film "Twelve Monkeys." (According to the gallery literature, all are real and have been visited by the artist.)

Lighter moments, but not by much, are provided by images of a casino, a squash court, a high school gymnasium, a classroom with a banner announcing "Klingon Language Institute" and a poolside view of a resort.

In one way or another, these images evoke questions of authority, control, morality and, well, fate, while indicting a great deal of architecture and design.

Painted on small unframed aluminum panels that are a little institutional themselves, they are more convincing, at least collectively, than Mr. Waite's previous mural-size works.

Their physical modesty belies their psychological weight, while their intimacy, enhanced by the ways in which they are cropped, places the viewer on the scene, thinking about what it means to be in these places and the troubles most of them have seen.

-- The New York Times
July 5, 1996

The color of remoteness

By ROBERT MAHONEY

Peter Waite
Edward Thorp Gallery

Peter Waite's realist paintings on aluminum have the chilly glamour of film noir movies. Waite's subjects include gambling casinos, prison cells, corporate board rooms and sports-related sites such as pools and gyms.

All of these places are presented as devoid of both people and feeling, and this remoteness is meant to suggest the overall emotional tenor of post-industrial life.

What distinguishes this work is its exquisite use of color and mood: Waite makes his hues rattle around in the emptiness of the scenes they depict.

In "Casino (Foxwoods)," he perfectly conveys a familiar sense of run-of-bad-luck resignation, using a dull purple to render a set of padded swivel stools standing forlornly in a casino.

In a painting of a classroom at the Klingon Language Institute, Waite uses a drab classroom brown as a way of underscoring the ridiculousness of a Trekkie obsession trying to pass itself off as adult education.

In "Surgery," Waite gets at the irony implicit in those institutional green walls: Though meant to be soothing, they only succeed in evoking the trauma of hospitalization.

In "The Gallies/Big Cheshire," one of several prison scenes, the use of an almost romantic shade of blue invests a death-row walkway with a fateful, meeting-one’s-maker sort of light.

Waite hangs his 35 paintings almost floor to ceiling, and this profusion of images maps out contemporary American culture as a place in which class distinctions are extreme, yet slippery.

For example, the viewer may juxtapose "Off Shore Bank (Bahamas)" with "Old Death Row" and think: Class is rigid, there are masters and slaves. But at the same time, crap tables, gyms, squash courts, video rooms, and nutty places like the Klingon Language Institute all suggest the fluidity of today's leisure society.

Waite's overriding metaphor may be best represented by the pale, silvery color of his aluminum-backed panels, suggesting that, ultimately, contemporary society is one big gray area.

--Time Out New York
July 1996

Views of power

By VICTORIA PEDERSEN

Peter Waite
Damon Brandt Gallery

Couched in history, Peter Waite uses the vocabulary of the past to speak to the present. He has chosen cultural institutions as his subject, but he uses them, not only as embodiments of power, but as repertoires of collective social memory as well. Waite is not merely a painter of history.

Using the veracity that a photograph seemingly implies, he presents paintings that are charged evocations of the mechanisms of power. Politics and art do, indeed, make creative bedfellows.

Waite's father, a historian of Nazism, took him around Europe to view the monuments of power and purpose, and these experiences have infused his work. His subjects are painted from personal memory. They are documents that demand discourse.

Typically, Waite's work is devoid of human presence. Drawing on historical places, Waite transfers meaning squarely onto structure. His richly detailed paintings, composed of panels constructed with a wry touch -- tiny, jeweled-head watch screws -- reflect his primary formalist concern -- the grid and the matrices of 17th century painting.

"Walhalla," after the memorial to Ludwig I, is a grim, imposing stone edifice whose atmosphere is palpable. "Walhalla" vividly captures Teutonic gloom and recalls Kiefer's early, monumental work. And like Kiefer, it is a reference, not a celebration.

Drawn from a Fascist building of the '40s in Rome, "Corridor" presents a visual articulation of anomie. "Corridor" is clearly that of power, with its insidious, limpid pools of eerie reflective light. It is a clinical, yet lush depiction that is disturbing, like a still from Bertolucci’s "The Conformist."

"Lessons of the Fourth Estate" is a document of an actual painting, "The Fourth Estate, 1902," that became the most recognized image of the labor movement in Italy. Waite places the social realistic painting in its current museum setting, Villa Reale, in Milan. It is a painting within a painting within a painting. Transformed by the museum setting from document to decoration. Waite renegotiates the defusion of the impact of the original through his sharp choice of composition. Using the matrices of 17th-century painting, the workers in Waite's "Lessons" confront us today, just as they did in 1902.

Peter Waite's paintings speak to monumentality, the power of placement, and the meta-order inside architectural structure. They are coded mirrors in which to view our own reflections.

-- Flash Art
March/April 1991