Peter Erik Lopez

 Two years ago, I arrived in Berlin for the first semester of the Transart Institute for Creative Research as one might arrive to one’s execution: not with blindfold and cigarette but rather walking with a portfolio full of figuration into an art world currently devaluing figuration and conventional oil on canvas. My initial body of work were portraits of friends, family, strangers, lovers, students, local actors and singers and performers.

In my first Transart critique, one reviewer advised me to, “keep doing portraits. Do nothing else”. Another reviewer said to me, “your portraits are beautiful, but by the end of this program I do not want to see anything like them”.

The journey had begun.

Before Transart, my work relied solely on what I can see (who I can see/how I can see them). My advisors struggled with advise for a portrait painter: We spoke of time, relationship, truth, color and i found myself fabricating a connection between myself, my work, and these themes—mainly so that I could keep painting portraits. But I was haunted by that advise, that warning, that challenge from my initial entree into the art world: “your portraits are beautiful, but by the end of this program I do not want to see anything like them”.

By the beginning of my second semester, things were not looking promising and i began to resign myself to the idea that I would not break free of conventional portrait work. The Transart program was rich and rigorous but my feet were stuck.

The Winter Residency took place in Brooklyn, New York and it was here that I met David Antonio Cruz, an artist (a painter!) (a figurative painter!)who was to become my next advisor.

On his first studio visit, David looked around and noted that my studio was filled with patterns and with disparate images (Mexican blankets, Greek pottery, pictures of local drag queens, comic book pages, brass statues of Hindu deities). David wondered at not seeing these patterns and influences in my work. He left me with a directive: “Juxtapose and create worlds”.

This directive spawned a series of ten pieces of various sizes (all acrylic on wood panel) that sought to usurp the aesthetic of Greek pottery (which often lionized the stories of gods, monsters, and heroes) in order to elevate the stories (or the tragedies) of brown and black queer men.

With this project, I felt I had accomplished the mission of art school: I had evolved past my initial work; I had made work that stayed true to what I enjoyed doing but went further than portraiture. But there was an element in this new work that was still missing something: “Where are you in the work?” was the echo that would haunt me in my next critique. I had begun to understand that I was hiding behind portrait work and I was hiding behind the tragedies of other queer brown and black men in an attempt to avoid making work that revealed anything about myself. I wasn’t interested in making work about myself, but I did begin to understand that without some stake in the game of what I was producing, the work was feeling flat.

I knew that I was a figurative artist but I also felt that there must be a way to work figuratively in the way that Francis Bacon worked—that is, in a way that touched sensation, that touched a nerve.

These two revelations (the idea of inserting myself in the work and the idea of making work that touched sensation) drove me to a family album that my mother had curated for me of my childhood many years ago. As Gerhard Richter leafed through the magazines of his day looking for inspiration, I leafed through this family album. What struck me about this photo album was what was missing (what is missing in all family albums): the pain, abuse, trauma—whole figures were elided.

I chose twelve images. I meditated on each image looking past the happy facade represented in the photograph and re-visualized each in a way that, to me, represented a more truthful version of the time depicted. These revisionings happened on small (6X8) scraps of canvas using oil paint.

While working through these memories, I found it helpful to write. The content of these writings. I collaborated with several artists and performers to connect these writings to the images in a way that I hope furthers my attempt at conveying sensation.

Credit and my thanks go to Flavia Bertorello, Andres “Chulisi” Rodriguez, Barbra Herr, and Syowia Kyambi.

The presentation can be found on the VIMEO link below. The password is “ursula”

https://vimeo.com/442073394

I was inspired to continue my work reconstituting photo archives by the fact that my visits to my mother in Florida always entailed a perusing through her own photo albums of her childhood and young adulthood in Germany.

Years ago, my mother wrote her memoirs (an exercise triggered by a fear that she was dying). Her memories are of a baby born under mountains that were rumored to be the dwelling place of witches, a child growing up in Nazi Germany with a father who was part of the Nazi party, a young lady pregnant by an America soldier. Rape, adultery, prostitution, physical abuse—the trials of being a woman or navigating “woman”, or navigating man’s conception of “woman”.

The project inspired ten pieces.