Peter Halasz “Fall into the Half Light”

Peter Halasz, Old Roses I, 2015, Oil on Panel, 45 x 55 Inches

EXHIBITION DATES
December 19, 2018, to February 16, 2019

ARTIST RECEPTION
Saturday, January 12, 2019 , 5pm to 7pm
Facebook Event Page

View on: Artsy

Nancy Toomey Fine Art is pleased to announce an exhibition of works by Peter Halasz entitled Fall into the Half Light on view from December 19, 2018, to February 16, 2019. The gallery is located inside San Francisco’s Minnesota Street Project, 1275 Minnesota Street. The public is invited to the artist reception on Saturday, January 12, 2019, from 5pm to 7pm. The artist will be present. Join the event page here.

Los Angeles based painter Peter Halasz hails from Southern California, where the cliffs and beaches of Windansea set in motion his exploration of the nocturnal ethereal half light that continues to inform his art and music. Halasz’s technique of layering glazed monochromatic colors, in both still life and portraiture, results in haunting, hallucinatory images that exist solely within their own realm. His images suggest a coming in, and moving away from, a conjured light that exists only in some half remembered dream. These psychologically charged tableaus rendered in seductive tones of ochre, petal pink, and foggy gray, set a mood where the familiar world ends and a less finite one begins. Taking his inspiration from sources as disparate as 19th century romanticism, the music of The Cure, and the Light and Space movement, the work remains distinctly his own, offering a contemporary take on a traditional medium.

Peter Halasz, Portal I, 2017, Oil on Panel, 83 x 54 Inches

Fall into the Half Light
by Peter Halasz

“Softly, as if I play piano in the dark…”
-OutKast

Somewhere between Vermeer’s subtle incandescence and the gloomy grandeur of Blade Runner‘s eternal twilight lies another realm. Distinct and yet, perhaps not. Here scraps of half-heard melody drift in and out of static washes as apparitions appear glinting in the half light: crepuscular, ominous, haunting- beckoning you further in… ghosts caught in obsidian, iridescent phantoms enacting silent operas, flickering bouquets which hover, drift and dissolve… Symphonies of longing and despair frozen between phrases. With what strange alchemy synthesize and distill in rapt attention these ghostly tableaus? Translate into glyph the holy relic, the enchanted mirror? The dark pool at eventide, the ocean cry, the gull cry? The windswept sea?
The hidden songs of the damned or the spirit residue of the departed?
The astral peregrinations of the Sleeping Hermaphrodite?
This the mist upon our heads and the dirt beneath our feet?
That was the star burning and this the cold dead light.
Dead, undead…Winter’s ashen feast still burning bright…

Peter Halasz, Old Roses III, 2016, Oil on Panel, 45 x 55 Inches

Furtive dreams these, lost in rapture at the tomb of Dionysius…
And what eldritch aesthetic adorns this sepulchral temple?
And is this the beauty to which we aspire?

Peter Halasz, Carapace, Oil on Panel, 39.5 x 33 Inches

Privilege sensual experience over analytic thought then, in pursuit of a decadent, hedonistic art. Cultivate lush resplendence. Elevate the feel. Retain demented belief in the holy relic, the arcane splendour of the baroque masterpiece, the saving grace of a perfect verse. Soliloquize the haunted rapture of an overdriven ’65 Fender Princeton (amplifier), reverb on 10. And there… in that space! Where clarion notes bleed and reverberate, become burning nebulae imbued with inarticulate glow and fiery distortion, pulsing in cathedral caverns beneath the sea… there you will find me: lost in the wild blue skies and the ecstasy of light, the orphic whisperings of the dark and the twilit wonderland between…

Peter Halasz

The paintings of Peter Halasz have been exhibited nationally at the Grand Rapids Museum of Art and at several galleries in Los Angeles, La Jolla, and New York. His work has been reviewed in publications such as Art Papers, The San Diego Union-Tribune, Art Scene, The Surfer’s Journal, LA Fashion Mag, and Riviera Magazine. Fall into the Half Light is Peter Halasz’s first exhibition at Nancy Toomey Fine Art.