Peter Flaccus

“I heard it said that in the water / there was a stone and a circle / and above the water a word/ that set the circle around the stone // I saw my poplar sink into the water, / saw its arm groping deep down, / and, reaching towards the sky, its roots implore night.”
— Paul Celan, from Threshold to Threshold

“In my view, a painting is a sort of natural phenomenon, like a tree, which doesn’t need a theory to stand up and wave its branches in the wind.”
— Peter Flaccus

This is a beautiful and immediately appealing idea: the painting as a plant, as a tree—the pleasure of seeing it thrive, the duty of tending it, and ultimately, the joy of contemplating its flourishing. Peter Flaccus would surely find an ally in Paul Klee, the great guardian and explorer of the tiniest, most essential details of the world, who compared the roots and trunk of a tree to the artist himself, reserving the leafy crown high above for the finished work of art. Piet Mondrian, on the other hand—among the great deities of twentieth-century abstraction—would have been far less inclined to agree. The mystic of order, hostile to any hint of natural spontaneity, settled his personal score by reducing a tree to its most uncompromising abstraction.

No matter how abstract a painting may be—and Flaccus’s works are wonderfully so, reflecting the widespread yearning for abstraction that currently permeates contemporary painting like a soothing balm—there is always what Roland Barthes called a “figurative ghost.” Hovering above us like a cloud in which we think we glimpse the profile of a familiar figure, it tenaciously follows and inevitably impresses itself upon the lines, materials, and colors that, arranged on a flat surface, would wish to be nothing but themselves—in their pure essence. Years ago, when Susan Stewart observed paintings similar to those now before us, she described seeing “the scallop shell of a pilgrim, the whorl in an infant’s hair, the architectural curve of a snail’s shell,” and felt as if she were gazing “into the deep, polished mass of water or the night sky,” while in certain red canvases, “it seemed as if one were staring at the sun or a furnace from afar.” Annemarie Sauzeau, for her part, described what Peter Flaccus’s works evoked for her as: “soap bubbles, concentric ripples spreading outward, cells, amoebas, stains, the cross-section of tree trunks, cosmic explosions—in short, organic and dynamic phenomena, alive and pulsating.”

Now, I am entitled to do so: here in Peter’s studio, contemplating this cluster of new, intensely colorful paintings—so lively and ever-changing in their dynamics, with no uniformity. “I want the paintings to be different, not serial,” the artist states. Within them, as if glimpsed from afar or suddenly appearing, I perceive vast watery masses and land viewed from above—perhaps a marsh—whirlpools in mud, ripples in wet sand, ice and snow melting in the sun, and wild, exuberant blooms. Eruptions of giant corollas open and already begin to die, while city maps unfold in arabesques and delicate ribbons that seem to beckon: “Follow this line and go there”—but exactly where? Roads, paths, interrupted trails… who knows. And then, from a much higher vantage, the view transforms entirely, revealing luminous galaxies in motion—rotating, colliding, merging, and unraveling as they take shape.

Indeed, even simply speaking of “landscapes” or “nature” has become more complex than ever, since these terms inevitably encompass visions of both the immensely small and the infinitely vast. Perhaps there are works of art—handmade, I mean, not necessarily high-tech—that already reveal to us phenomena which telescopes and microscopes have yet to detect. The restless Jackson Pollock, flailing his canvases with marks, drips, and threads, sometimes seemed to anticipate, in a spectacular act of foresight, the cosmic images that are now widely known.

Subtly, other figures emerge in the paintings Flaccus created in the 1970s—architectures, structures, house facades. “Before, there was always a top and a bottom,” Peter explains, “an ideal horizon dividing sky and earth,” and this persisted even through the phase of telluric expressionism that the American painter explored in the following decade. Then it vanished. I believe one of his greatest achievements is his ability to intuit an elastic, curved, deep—one might even say multidimensional—space, where everything exists everywhere, much like in Claude Monet’s Water Lilies. As if, after a gentle, soft big bang at the dawn of an undefined universe, movements and forces in play generate slow, relaxed contractions and expansions, manipulating primary elements—air, water, light, darkness—sometimes drawn, and magnetized by invisible fields, sometimes cast into a kind of controlled shipwreck, drifting on mysterious currents. The paintings themselves seem to breathe. In the rhythm of this lighter style, they no longer exist as mere formal arrangements, but as events unfolding before us.

The Flaccus probe charted vast expanses of black, glimpsing through its porthole luminous figures, like comets or creatures periodically discovered in the ocean’s depths. It was his way of questioning the invisible. Emerging from that darkness, the color is now astonishingly intense: pearly halos spill into our retinas, with unpredictable shades and variations of reds, violets, and the deepest blues. Colors ceaselessly seek themselves, their own apex, crossing the boundaries that separate them from other colors.

I am now contemplating the latest diptych—a carpet of saturated yellow, threaded with green branches and dotted with marks. It is as if it wishes to speak to me in a magical language long lost, radiant in its silent splendor. Magnificent. I want to recall that this passage—this emergence into daylight and light itself—was deeply experienced long ago by Odilon Redon, resulting in works that were true jewels. Later, Klee would proclaim, “I am color!”—to which, much later, the Italian artist Gregorio Botta, echoing that genius while working with the pliant medium, responded, “I am wax!”. In a sense, Peter could simultaneously embody both declarations, and it is worth reflecting on why.

Peter, as is well known, works in encaustic, an ancient technique that blends pigments with molten wax. The hot, malleable material is spread, pushed, and scraped away with a spatula in gestures that expand, guide, accommodate, and remove excess — a rhythm of adding and subtracting that brings painting close to sculpture. Peter sculpts in color, and one cannot help but feel that he is literally possessed by this technique. Francesco Moschini is right when he describes Flaccus’s encaustics as “a celebration of the epiphany of the sacred. There is indeed a rituality in this meticulous compulsion to repeat, which involves the same reverent gestures each time the artist leans over the panel, laid out horizontally before him, to be flooded by the generative matter which, with a few skillful and measured additions of pigment, will always and again allude to the miraculousness of the origin of the world.” One might ask: does the Absolute, too, take shelter—crouched and hidden—within these sinuous curves and along these colored shores, beyond our gaze and our longing for emptiness?

Encaustic allows Flaccus to work slowly, gathering and releasing energy as he goes, guiding the material’s overflowing movement through a delicate balance of intention and chance. “Every work is a new experiment,” Peter affirms, “because a painting that already knows where it’s going before it begins never really takes flight.” He is determined to be surprised. The result is a body of work—completed in that uniquely definitive way that only encaustic can impose—that still reveals its own oscillating, floating genesis, preserving the trace of its creation in luminous transparency.

I speak of transparency with good reason. The wax generates an emerging, tentative space, allowing signs and colors to exist at the border between what surfaces and what remains hidden. Essentially, like resin slowly flowing down a tree trunk (and two!) and eventually hardening into amber, the wax envelops, protects, and above all reveals what endures. Translucent-opaque, fluid-solid matter captures not stable, fixed forms, but the movement of energies, secret substances in motion, pulsations, gravitations, stains, and halos. Peter Flaccus brings us to the edge of those gentle, luminous depths made possible by the transparency of his technique—places of aeration and purification, as in Rothko according to Michel Butor, but freed from the tragic—right at the point where the artistic investigation pauses, illuminates itself, and becomes revelation.