Rose Prison over Silver Prison

‘Since 1980, my images seem, step by step, to have grown more complex and fast-paced in a way that somehow parallels the acceleration of the movement and information in the new computer culture. I take great pleasure in the idea that my work could be a mirror of this era of change.’
PETER HALLEY


Composed in perfect structural symmetry, Peter Halley’s painting Rose Prison over Silver Prison is a large-scale work from his celebrated body of geometric abstractions. Executed in 2008, the work presents a compelling example of the artist’s architectural ‘prison’ and ‘cell’ iconography, signature motifs employed since the 1980s to explore an increasingly geometrized world. This transformative ordering of social space is reflected in the rectilinear network of cells and conduits which pervade his canvases. Rendered in radiant Day-Glo hues of gold, deep rose and fluorescent yellow, over a mirrored ‘prison’ sequence of sky-blue, silver and candy-apple red, Rose Prison over Silver Prison exemplifies the psycho-social approach to abstraction that first brought Halley to prominence in New York during the 1980s. Halley’s use of Roll-A-Tex – a textural additive common to suburban buildings – lends a base architectural quality to the work, as if extracted from the ceiling of a clinic or motel. Like his contemporaries Jeff Koons and Ashley Bickerton, Halley was initially associated with the so-called neo-geometric (‘Neo-Geo’) conceptualist movement that took hold in the East Village. Building on the languages of Pop Art, Minimalism and Op Art, and deeply influenced by the writings of the French post-structuralists, his work sought to capture what he saw as the rapid urbanisation and technologisation of modern life. His compositions strove to reflect not only the city’s three-dimensional urban grid, but also the burgeoning flow of information spawned by computer technology. Whilst in Halley’s earlier ‘prison’ paintings, geometric abstraction forms a metaphor for the isolating effects of such structures, by the 1990s onwards his paintings begin to simultaneously embrace the exhilarating potential of technological communication. In a ‘high-tech’ world which traps and enraptures in equal measure, the structural equipoise of the present work seems to evoke the dynamism of a digital age at once solitary and seductive.