CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 5/16/2017

Peter Halley: Boats Crosses Trees Figures 1977–78

Here’s a book we can’t put down—yet another tactile masterpiece from Karma. Peter Halley: Boats Crosses Trees Figures 1977–78 collects the artist’s early works on paper, made during his years in New Orleans just prior to his meteoric rise in '80s New York. Here we see what came before the cells and conduits. “We infer imminent transitions,” Richard Speer writes, “New Orleans to New York; New Image to Neo-Geo; idealism and romanticism to skepticism and post-structuralism; relative obscurity to the satisfactions and pressures of art-world renown; and a larger cultural trajectory from the earnestness of the Carter presidency and the exhilaration of the Sexual Revolution to the dual specters of the Reagan presidency and the AIDS epidemic. For Halley, as for the nation, these transitions were jarring and epochal. The gouache paintings, with their cheery checkerboards and gold-star appliqué, gaze at us across the divide as from another world. Is it possible for squares, rectangles, and the occasional triangle to engender nostalgia? If so, then the gouaches conjure up the sweet, heavy scents of the Vieux Carré: magnolia, bougainvillea, oleander, and the faintest whiff of apple blossom wafting through the garden.”