Between the Lines: Peter Stephens + Cecil Touchon

(SANTA FE, NM) Nüart Gallery presents “Between the Lines,” an exhibition of new abstract paintings by Peter Stephens and Cecil Touchon. The exhibition runs November 4th through November 20th, 2022, with an opening reception on Friday, November 4 from 5-7 pm.

The artists’ work is multilayered and complex, utilizing various materials as it transforms structured concepts such as mathematics, science, and typography into visually stimulating abstraction. While varied in process and style, both bodies of work are created in accordance with the natural world for a pleasing aesthetic that is also intellectually satisfying.

Peter Stephens’ acrylic and collage paintings begin with an underlying grid of commercial paint sample cards, which the artist explains as a “spontaneous, interchangeable surface to explore color relationships and interactions within given parameters.” From this structured ground, the artist layers acrylic pattern line by line, creating a matrix effect akin to that of a textile or architectural mosaic. The style, which Stephens began working in last year, is inspired by the physics behind mechanisms of pattern generation, and the mathematical formulas that describe them. His latest paintings further refine this geometric vocabulary, with an emphasis on the “complexity, mutability, and ephemeral qualities” of color. “The paintings translate scientific inspirations into a visual, multilayered landscape that in layer after layer enfolds one gradient of reality on another,” he says.
Cecil Touchon presents both paintings and collages for the exhibition, with a body of work titled, From a Shoreless Sea, Poems in the Present Tense. His pieces are based on the visual elements of typography, as they transform “verbal language into a form of visual architecture.” The intuitive act of layering, gluing, and painting becomes an exploration of spatial and material relationships within each piece. Each decision the artist makes informs the next: a harmonious, rhythmic process that results in a unique conclusion. “I sometimes imagine that I am an archeologist trying to reconstruct an unknown text from found fragments of a lost or unknown civilization,” says the artist of his latest work. “Since these compositions are all black-and-white relationships, each composition is like looking at the constant flux of yin and yang. The sense of what is positive and what is negative is always shifting back and forth.”