Current paintings

“Gallery&Studio”

Peckolick's Subliminal Sign Language - Robert Vigo Nov-Dec 2003/Jan 2004 We live in a world inundated with signs, a realization which has given us the study of semiotics and some of the most astute writings of Roland Barthes. Everywhere we go, we are besieged by images, logos, and fragments of text. They permeate our consciousness and to some degree define our mental landscape. As a successful designer and commercial artist Bronx-born Pratt graduate Alan Peckolick inhabited this landscape professionally for years. Now, as a fine artist recently featured in an exhibition at Agora Gallery, 415 West Broadway, Peckolick employs letterforms and signage in accomplished photorealist paintings in acrylic and oil pastel on paper. While the letterforms and logos that Peckolick worked with in his design career were probably pristine and unblemished, the opposite is true in his paintings. Signs drawn from his own photography are transformed by time and the grime of the urban environment. He captures their character with the insight of a portrait painter who does not flatter his subjects. Rather he delineates the kind of beauty that we see in the faces of mature people who have known both joy and suffering, and have survived scarred but unbowed. Indeed, the expressive quality of Peckolick's work sets it apart from that of other artists such as Andy Warhol, who began as an illustrator, and James Rosenquist who worked as a sign painter. While both Warhol and Rosenquist carried impassive commercial surfaces over into their work as Pop artists without inflection, Peckolick does the opposite - employing them to convey atmosphere and a sense of urban drama. Without introducing a linear narrative, Peckolick's painting "Hardware," for example, hints at the perils of modern life with phrases such as "Burglar Stop Gates." Here, too, the last letter of the word "Paint" is partially obscured, so that it registers another message - at least subliminally. A shadow falling across the sign enhances the mood, while bird droppings streaming down over the letters lend a visual appeal akin to the drips and splatters in certain canvases by the Abstract Expressionists. Stains, tears, rust, and other imperfections, which Peckolick obviously seeks out selectively and renders in a trompe l'oeil manner, add a tactile quality to other paintings such as "Griffon on Seventh" and "Travel" to rival that of the Italy's Art Povera artistsÑwho present actual torn street posters as found art works. The dramatic allusiveness that distinguishes Alan Peckolick's work from that of his Pop predecessors is especially striking in the painting he calls "Coke," a word with contemporary connotations that go beyond the word "Cola," which we see emblazoned across a building in a noirish nocturnal cityscape that also includes a shadowy figure glimpsed in a window. Here, a stylish post-Pop synthesis of pulp detective magazine cover illustration and Hopperesque desolation creates a mood that makes one eager to see more of this gifted artist, who has been well received in Japan as well as New York. For while Alan Peckolick has been justly praised by the New York Times for painting "signs as they appear on the walls, ravaged by time," his work has an even deeper dimension of submerged meanings that make it doubly appealing.