CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 6/5/2019

Landmark 'Peter Halley: Paintings of the 1980s' catalogue raisonné is new from JRP|Ringier

“Blue Cell with Triple Conduit” (1986) is reproduced from Peter Halley: Paintings of the 1980s, the new catalogue raisonné from JRP|Ringier, launching tonight at Mast Books. In his essay, “Facts Are Useless in Emergencies” (a phrase borrowed from the Talking Heads’ song “Crosseyed and Painless,” quoted in a 1981 Halley essay), Paul Pieroni comments on Halley’s pointed use of industrio-suburban materials like Day-Glo paint and Roll-a-Tex® additive as representing his “disillusionment with the idea of art as a privileged object somehow separate from the world of neon-pink detergent packaging or stucco domestic interiors. Against notions inherited from previous generations—principally that an original, autonomous, self-referential art could have a transformative effect on society, or resist its worst effects—Halley’s painting relinquishes itself to stylistic repetition, brazen semio-clash and exaggerated formal hyper-realization. For Halley all that remains are models which, in line with Baudrillard’s theory of the simulacra, endlessly orbit in contemporary culture.”