I saw a man pursuing the horizon;
Round and round they sped.
I was disturbed at this;
I accosted the man.
“It is futile,” I said,
“You can never —”
“You lie,” he cried,
And ran on.
—Stephen Crane, 1905

In November, Peter Brock brought his recent paintings to my home in upstate New York and arranged them in my garden. Facing the Hudson River, in the unmediated light, the paintings sat in the earth among rhododendrons. Near here, the nineteenth-century Hudson River School painters captured expansive vistas, generating a whitewashed narrative about the boundlessness of the American landscape and its riches. I thought of these imposing images in July, when historic rains—reportedly a one-in-one-thousand-year weather event—flooded our home and swept much of the landscape down into that same river. After the rain, the severe erosion exposed the blunt materiality of what underlies our roads, our lawns and sidewalks. Boulders and root systems, threatening and fragile in their own way.

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This context suited Brock’s paintings, geometric abstractions with heavily worked passages that recall at once glacial landscapes, alchemical processes, and bioluminescence. In his work, one sees the artist interweaving various traditions of modern painting to reckon with the intersections and contradictions of the romantic and technological sublimes. He works through and processes visual metaphors to investigate our contemporary ways of seeing—asking with each painting, what is this mode of looking that must at once behold physical and virtual ecosystems, technological advancement and environmental ruin, images of abundance and poverty? What occurs in this compartmentalized eye? It’s a spiritual issue, as well as one of perception and class. It is, he summarizes, “a laptop powered by a lithium battery with Yosemite as its default screensaver.” (Lithium, of course, is extracted in a process that contaminates air, water, and soil alike, contributing to environmental damage that disproportionately impacts poor communities, but threatens the natural resources exalted in imagery of our protected lands the world over.) What are we seeing, with our heads in the sand? Brock doesn’t foreground these concerns didactically, but rather considers them through an inquiry of the formal vocabularies that have been used to reflect subjectivity since the industrialization and urbanization of the late nineteenth century. We see stylistic nods to color field painting and hard-edged abstraction, but also conceptual resonance with the Arte Povera and Group Zero projects. Across his paintings, Brock plays with the conventional formats of portrait and landscape, introducing hinged pictorial planes that gesture to the space of the laptop.

There are often multiple horizons, gesturing variously to the conclusion of the perceivable physical distance, and the edge of a digital screen. The circle also recurs, carrying with it all its connotations—of planet and atom, pupil and peephole, haptic drip and digital icon, blind spot. The surfaces and supports of Brock’s paintings likewise contain disparate material references. He applies plaster to aluminum panels and then sets about a process of layering, sanding, carving, scoring, and painting pigment. He mixes sand from outside his Brooklyn studio into his plaster, grounding the works, for all their cosmic imagery, in the physical location of their origin. This materiality recalls the fact that our technologies too are tied to the natural world, despite the other dimensions of which they promise. In places, the aluminum is left uncovered and buffed to a mirror polish, integrating yet another perspective into the space of the image. With these mirrored areas, Brock explores the dynamics between space and duration, reality and representation—but we might also think of the reflection as mimicking the function of the screen, which so often hones in on and markets to its viewer, ever-shortening the circuits of desire and knowledge. These paintings are luminous and spectral, offering up dissonant pictorial logic and deconstructed icons of postwar painting. Among these fractured landscapes, one wonders to which horizons we are oriented.

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Text by Annie Godfrey Larmon

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Peter Brock (b.1986) lives and works in New York. He has an MFA in painting from the Milton Avery School of Art at Bard College, and studied in Monika Baer’s class at the Städelschule in Frankfurt, Germany. His work has been exhibited at Diez Gallery, Amsterdam; International Objects, Brooklyn; Nino Mier, Los Angeles; Spencer Brownstone Gallery, New York; Goeben, Berlin; Root Canal, Amsterdam; Calle Cedro 328, Mexico City; Peana Projects, Monterrey; 83 Pitt Street, New York; _2B, Madrid;321 Gallery, Brooklyn; and Federico Vavasorri, Milan, among others. He received the IAAC award for art criticism in 2021 and regularly publishes reviews and essays with Frieze Magazine, Art-Agenda, Texte Zur Kunst, Flash Art, The Brooklyn Rail, and Artillery Magazine.