Peter Halley : A Monograph

Painting as simulation and hyperreality: Peter Halley and the digital age. In the 1980s, Peter Halley revitalised painting by relying on sociology and science fiction. He employed fluorescent colours and Roll-A-Tex to deconstruct early and mid-twentieth-century transcendent geometric abstraction into abstract cells and prisons and by adding conduits to imaginatively access outside forces. Peter Halley has met many challenges posed by the Information Age and French poststructuralism by situating his painting on the divide separating analogue and digital worlds. Robert Hobbs’s monograph analyses Halley’s geometric and highly keyed art in terms of opportunities provided by the Internet, aesthetic possibilities afforded by Photoshop, timely relevance advanced by Michel Foucault’s and Jean Baudrillard’s sociological theories, and conundrums presented by both science fiction and physics.

What a prominent contemporary artist reveals about painting in the digital age—an era characterized by simulation and hyperreality.
 
At the height of postmodernism, just as the digital world was becoming a reality, Peter Halley revitalized painting by affiliating his work with sociology and science fiction. Employing lowbrow, commercial media—fluorescent colors and Roll-A-Tex, an additive used to surface suburban architecture—he debunked painting’s high art connotations. Deconstructing early- and mid-twentieth-century geometric abstraction, he transposed its rectangles into structures he referred to as “cells” and “prisons.” He then connected these with straight lines, or “conduits,” to imaginatively access outside forces.
 
Halley has met many of the challenges posed by the information age and French poststructuralism by situating his painting on the divide separating analog and digital worlds. Robert Hobbs’s monograph analyzes Halley’s geometric art in relation to the opportunities provided by the internet, the aesthetic possibilities afforded by Photoshop, Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction, Michel Foucault’s and Jean Baudrillard’s sociological theories, and the conundrums presented by both science fiction and physics.