Motion in LAndscape - Andrew Peycha
September 16 - October 1, 2006 

Autumn Marsh
36 X 60 inches

Autumn Motion
48 X 84 inches

Fallen Motion
36 X 36 inches

Beginnings
36 X 48 inches, 91.4 x 121.9 cm

Nocturne
48 X 36 inches

We are very pleased to host our first solo exhibition of paintings by Andrew Peycha. Since he began exhibiting with the gallery in 2001 Andrew has continued to hone his unique vision and skills as a painter, producing an impressive and finely focused body of work. He draws his inspiration from the Canadian landscape and, from the start, his love of nature has been translated into vibrantly coloured, energetic canvases which seem to effortlessly capture the mood of the land and to radiate a sense of joy. He continues to explore new ways to express the intensity of this reaction in paint, and to invent new ways to situate the viewer within his paintings. Recently, Andrew has developed a more formal approach which introduces the theme of movement around and through the landscape as a consistent element. In some paintings, screens of trees are geometricised into vertical grids through which horizontal bars of broken colour rush; in others, negative spaces surrounding the traceries of tree limbs on the horizon take on a density and solidity which make the foreground seem insubstantial in comparison.

These devices can suggest many things about the ways we experience the landscape, and how artists can respond to it. There is an echo here of the Impressionist colour banding adopted by the Group of Seven in their heroic canvases, and also an awareness of the digital effects more recently available to visual artists. There is an obvious reference to the blurred, peripheral glimpse of landscape familiar to many of us as it hurtles past our car windows – a kind of visual Doppler Effect which compresses colour and form. Andrew also delights in distorting spatial relationships and playing with the idea of depth and viewpoint in these new paintings. Often, bright background elements rush forward to form colour ladders stacked vertically between dark tree trunks, or stream horizontally as if they are trying to catch up with the foreground. The effect is to explode the expected structure of landscape into an abstraction where colour surrounds the viewer, and to dislocate any real sense of our “location” within that landscape. The result is a wonderful group of paintings which offer us an opportunity to see through the artist’s eyes, and which reveal the landscape in a new way.

- Ineke Zigrossi, Director

Artist's Statement

I’ve always had a close relationship with nature, and a special interest in the shifting play of various natural patterns in the environment. Much of my painting has been about exploring and expressing these recurring patterns in different ways. Lately, this search has taken a more abstract, less ‘representational’, direction which focuses on the idea of motion.
In the current body of work, I’ve re-organized nature into vertical and horizontal grids, and used this structure to play with space, pattern, colour, and form. The effect is similar to a kaleidoscope or stained glass window, which fragments an image and reassembles it in a new way. It allows me to reconsider something as familiar as the landscape and emphasize its patterns: the dance of geometry against organic forms, the distinction between depth and distance, the movement created by the placement of colour. My desire is to create an illusion of depth and vibration throughout the image, and to capture some of the feeling the landscape gives to me.

- Andrew Peycha

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