PETER JOSEPH

Formally trained in graphic design, Peter Joseph pursued an artistic career only after surviving a dangerous, near fatal brain tumor in his 20s. He visited the exhibition The New American Painting at the Tate Gallery in 1959, at the age of 29, where he first experienced the work of Abstract Expressionist painters Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman. His own works before 1970 focused on primary colour and performativity at scale, garnering critical and institutional acclaim. However, Joseph’s ultimate aesthetic epiphany came during a visit to the cinema in the late 1960s when he fell asleep during the film, waking to be bathed in just the residual flickering light of the projector on the silver screen. Joseph sat staring at this blank space, the faint central glow of the empty projection creating a darker border around it. This experience inspired the nuanced relationship of light and colour between a border and a central motif that would come to define his oeuvre for many decades to come, containing what he described, in conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist, as ‘a delicacy about it. It wasn’t just a simple tone or colour. And I realised that this, to me, had more possibility in it for what I could only call a reflection.’

Gradually, with Joseph’s ever thoughtful and deliberate focus, and ‘less is more’ philosophy, the outline of these Border works became thicker as he began to play with the relative colour and size of the two rectangles. By the 1980s—after a significant number of these works were acquired by the Panza Collection (now part of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation)—the paintings evolved again, foregrounding the emotional charge of the sublime over the intellectual pursuit of abstract, hard-edged painting. Reflecting upon that original cinematic encounter, Joseph began to experiment with subtle tonal difference by juxtaposing complementary swatches of paper one on top of another. These studies, and the subsequent paintings, were typically titled with the two constituent colours, for example Light Pink with Cobalt Blue (1994). Their simplicity sought to convey clarity and depth in both vision and feeling. The exhibition at Lisson Gallery traces this undulation between the scale and proportion of the rectangles, displaying studies and paintings created nearly 40 years ago.

Throughout his career, Joseph cited early Venetian and Florentine painting, as well as Classical and Neo-Classical architecture as his primary influences, and subscribed to methodologies more typically associated with Renaissance painters and the likes of Claude Lorrain and Tintoretto, than of his minimalist contemporaries. He painted in natural light, from his studio in the English countryside, and believed the work should be viewed in similar conditions, so that they could be ‘absorbed’. His appreciation for tonality and time-based sensibilities imbued his work with melody and harmony. As Nicholas Logsdail noted in his recent reflection on the artist’s life for Frieze magazine: ‘He compared his paintings to music and often spoke of music as the first form of abstraction, with many great composers, from Johann Sebastian Bach onwards, more interested in sentiment than narrative. This was what Peter sought: to remove the content while retaining the meaning, thereby amplifying the emotion.’