Halley’s Neo-Geo DayGlo-Pro Comet

Peter Halley, Babylon, 2022, Acrylic, fluorescent acrylic, Flashe and Roll-a-Tex on canvas. ©Peter Halley. Courtesy the artist and Karma.
  

By BRUCE HELANDER December 30, 2024

The current exhibition at the NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale of luminous compositions by the renowned artist Peter Halley (b. 1953, New York), an unforgettable, immersive, site-specific installation commissioned for the museum’s second floor galleries, is titled “The Mirror Stage,” which embraces the profound reflective radiance the artist has mastered during his celebrated career. On view through mid-January, “The Mirror Stage,” a double play on words, thrusts viewers into a universe comprised of two nearly identical embellished spaces, each accessed through separate doors at opposite ends of a large rectangular gallery split in half. A solid dividing wall inserted at the center of the gallery prevents viewers passing through from either side, persuading them to move back and forth between two entrances to experience and compare the dual installation in its entirety. The artist further amplified the mirroring effect of the two grand opposite spaces by laminating the walls with a highly reflective vinyl as well as a massive, towering mock-building block wall that not only welcomes a visitor but simultaneously suggests a foreboding insinuation of discovery with double secretive glowing access at either end.

In 1980, Halley returned to Manhattan from New Orleans and moved into a loft studio on East 7^th Street in the East Village, where Rhode Island School of Design graduate and ex- Talking Heads frontman, David Byrne, was his upstairs neighbor. New York City had a lasting influence on Halley’s distinct painting style, as he became enamored with the city’s intensity within the largest support group of professional artists, critics and curators on the planet. During the 1980s, the artist developed a particular visual vocabulary that he utilized for over forty years. Deploying the visual language of geometric abstraction, he produced diagrammatic paintings representing social subjects. At a time when painting was declared dead by critics, Halley revitalized abstract painting by creating flat, symmetrical compositions centered on socially constructed and controlling fixed shapes that often suggested “prison window bars” and “cells,” conducted by “conduits” surrounded by squares of brilliant glowing color combinations. His use of synthetic, anti-naturalistic fluorescent and metallic substances (custom mixed at the artist’s exact direction by Golden Artist Colors in New Berlin, New York) along with the commercial paint additive Roll-a-Tex, which adds wave-like texture to the surface of his paintings, firmly roots his work in the technological age. DayGlo is a brand of extremely brightly tinted pigments and paints that become fluorescent in daylight, converting ultraviolet light into a magical creative ingredient. In the mid-1990s, Halley pioneered wall-size digital prints in his site-specific installations. The architectonic silhouettes that he uses in his installations, such as iconic structures, shimmering color, shiny surfaces and spatial illusion, direct the viewer’s movement and experience, thereby heightening awareness of the controlling aspects of our constructed and increasingly virtual built environments. This exceptional signature style and innovative instincts were developed over a period of twenty years, and the current show at the NSU Art Museum certainly is the Roll-a-Tex icing on top of a vibrant, textured cubist cake.

Installation image, Peter Halley: The Mirror Stage, 2024. Courtesy of NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale.
 

Halley’s historic exhibition at Sonnabend Gallery in 1989 in the heyday of SoHo was a blockbusting, radiant display of interlocking squares soaked in vibrant DayGlo paints. The works on view were not only revolutionary but stunned the art world with fresh images of bravado and audacity, daringly effervescent and deliberate color field simplicity placed in an uneven checkerboard composition that also may have gathered inspiration from related fragments of works by artists like Josef Albers, Jules Olitski, Piet Mondrian, Kazimir Malevich and Sean Scully as well as Bridget Riley and Günther Förg. The show also marked a dramatic departure from the stylistically dominant Neo-Expressionist fraternity that included Anselm Kiefer, Eric Fischl, David Salle, Julian Schnabel and Enzo Cucchi. Coincidently, I was showing my collages at the Peder Bonnier Gallery on the first floor of 420 West Broadway (that also housed the legendary Leo Castelli Gallery that was concurrently exhibiting Rauschenberg) at the same time period of Halley’s innovative display, which gave me the opportunity to visit his show daily, where I developed a clear and concise perspective on his revolutionary panache, but also had the unexpected excitement of crowds and critics entering the ground floor entrance as word quickly began to spread downtown about his unforgettable exhibition.
 

Installation image, Peter Halley: The Mirror Stage, 2024. Courtesy of NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale.
 

Like the glowing works on view, the art world provided glowing reviews and motivated collectors that put Halley on the map. His work gained early acclaim, with solo exhibitions at prestigious venues like the Museum of Modern Art in New York and Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid and later at the Centre Pompidou (Paris) and the Tate (London).

There is a kind of color juxtaposition with Halley’s work demonstrated within the NSU Art Museum show that pulls together his vibrating shapes whose surfaces depend on confrontation and contrast. Looking back at historic landscapes, Claude Monet’s renowned series of the Houses of Parliament during sunset at the turn of the 20^th century embraced the aesthetic friction between light and dark and was punctuated by a virtual DayGlo-like glimmering, orange, ball-of-fire sun, which coincidently is characteristic of both Halley’s palette and of the super vivid, highly elliptical comet that shares the artist’s same last name and passes by earth in a dazzling blast every 70-plus years. J.M.W. Turner’s fiery 1844 “Sunset,” perhaps the first unofficial color field painting completed, was shocking at the time due to its simplicity and as a de facto commemoration of explosive, all-over paint saturation. Coincidentally, over a hundred years later, Madison Avenue advertising agencies began to test market grocery store items that could enhance sales by radically brightening up their shelf appeal. The first DayGlo-like color enhancements were printed on boxes of Tide laundry detergent, which apparently helped push the product to become the bestselling detergent in history.

Installation image, Peter Halley: The Mirror Stage, 2024. Courtesy of NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale.
 

A unique aspect of Halley’s technique is certainly his choice of materials. From common home decoration materials, he employs a product called Roll-a-Tex, a gritty additive that lends a tactile quality to his work like a gentle, reflective rippling surface of a calm ocean. Applying paint with a roller instead of a brush, Halley deliberately avoids the artist’s traditional hand-to-canvas touch, emphasizing the mechanical over the personal. This choice seems to align with his conceptual goals, transforming his canvases into geometric shapes, often accented with flowery wallpaper-like backgrounds. The jarring hues and hard-edge non-narrative forms create a visual vibrational “shockwave,” both seducing and unsettling viewers with a representation of urban life’s relentless energy and confinement. Beyond painting in a square, Halley has ventured into ambitious installations, using large-scale prints and immersive environments to deepen his exploration of modern isolation.

Installation image, Peter Halley: The Mirror Stage, 2024. Courtesy of NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale.
 

The NSU Art Museum has the perfect setting for these large-scale, hand-constructed environments, which often literally stretch from floor to ceiling. The massive high spaces of the museum’s interiors seem to be a natural environment for these ambitious installations. As you climb the grand stairway leading to the second floor exhibition area, you can sense peripherally the reflective “glow of the show” before you actually discover and explore the inviting spaces that entice you in like a circus barker in the spotlight, corralling a curious crowd with a standard pitch of rare and never been seen before phenomena coupled with gleaming lights and DayGlo banners designed to get your attention. While this memorable display is not anything like the P.T. Barnum standard sideshow spectacle of a two-headed cow or a bearded lady appearing behind the big top, the Peter Halley exhibition continues to draw admiring crowds that are amazed by the unconventional configuration of dazzling color combinations and ingenious overlapping shapes that make this intriguing work a theoretical contender for the brightest show on earth.

The exhibition was curated by Bonnie Clearwater, Director and Chief Curator of NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale.

Peter Halley: The Mirror Stage, an immersive site-specific installation, continues through January 12, 2025. For more information: https://nsuartmuseum.org/exhibition/peter-halley/ WM