2009
Into the Light: Recent Paintings by Josh Peters
In 1940 a freelance commercial illustrator named Warner Sallman painted a shoulder-length portrait of Jesus Christ. The following year a Chicago-based publisher began to market lithographic prints of the painting. According to statistics released by the company in 1984, Sallman’s Head of Christ had been reproduced more than 500 million times, appearing on prayer cards, funeral announcements, church bulletins, and in countless other formats. Scholars have examined the extraordinary popularity of this image, noting how it balances a ruggedly handsome portrayal of Jesus with hints of femininity. But the greatest appeal of Head of Christ may lie in its concise expression of spiritual enlightenment. Sallman rendered Jesus in three-quarters view, steadily gazing up and off the right side of the canvas. A soft golden light backlights most of Jesus’s head, and seems to arise from his calm contemplation of an unseen force beyond the frame.
I found myself thinking about Sallman’s iconic image while looking at Josh Peters’s new paintings. Peters does not paint Jesus, nor is there anything particularly Christian about his work. But like the Head of Christ, many of his recent paintings present isolated figures in meditative states. In Golden Gaze #6, for example, the cropped face of a young man dominates a large canvas. Expertly manipulating thin washes of acrylic paint, Peters describes a thin nose, a smudge of a mouth, and ringlets of hair that resemble wafting smoke. Amidst this summary and ghostly rendering, the man’s eyes are surprisingly expressive, and capture the curious combination of distraction and focus that characterizes reverie. Like most of Peters’s paintings, Golden Gaze #6 is based on an existing image – in this case a picture of an entranced audience member at a 1967 Doors concert. And while the painting’s rosy glow may derive from the concert’s stage lights, Peters exploits this unnatural ambiance to conjure an altered consciousness.
Photographs and film stills have inspired several other recent paintings. In Caveman!, which reworks a scene from the movie 10,000 BC, Peters pulls away from the face to situate the figure in a barren landscape. Here the paint application is much thicker, and energetic strokes of grey, blue and orange suggest a windswept environment. Despite this agitation, the man squints to the left with fierce determination, and the stuttering suggestion of a third eye above his nose may symbolize a higher plane of self-awareness. A similar contrast occurs in Muddy Buddy, where a figure’s head and shoulders are largely obscured by a coarse mixture of brownish paint and ground pumice stone. But once again the eyes command attention. Peering out from under this heavy mask, the man’s fixed gaze seems strangely serene, as though transcending the weight of his earthly existence.
Enlightenment has been a theme in Peters’s work for some time. An earlier series of paintings depicted large groups of people engaged in cultish behaviors. These scenes of communal rapture often include choreographed dancing, primitivistic regalia, and penumbral lighting. Such narrative devices are largely missing from Peters’s recent work, but his current focus on single figures involves the spectator in a new manner. Instead of standing apart from a closed circle of escapist ritual, we now observe contemplative individuals at close range. And although none of these figures acknowledge the viewer, they effectively mirror our own act of sustained looking. Not unlike Warner Sallman’s ubiquitous image of Jesus, Peters’s new protagonists may function as intercessors, spiritual surrogates who channel the spectator’s search for meaning and fulfillment.
Matthew Guy Nichols teaches art history at Christie’s Education in New York and is a frequent contributor to Art in America.