Peter Rostovsky, Housefire, 2007, Oil on linen, 54 x 44".

Peter Rostovsky, Stadium, 2007, Oil on linen, 78 x 46".

Peter Rostovsky, X-ray Series: Ophelia, 2007, Oil on linen, 28 x 19".

Peter Rostovsky, Corona, 2007, Oil on linen, 22 x 18".

Peter Rostovsky, Boy Alone, 2004, Oil on linen, 60 x 46".

Sara Meltzer Gallery
525-531 West 26th Street
212-727-9330
New York
Peter Rostovsky:
This Distant World
January 8-
February 14, 2009

For the past few years, Rostovsky has been photographing the world around him and collecting images from the Internet as source material for his exactingly rendered, atmospheric paintings. This Distant World continues his fascination with mediation and mediated imagery, presenting a portrait of our time that is both familiar and ordinary, yet charged with allegorical meaning.

The Gymnast Series includes life-size depictions of gymnasts at the moment of dismount from their respective apparatus. Drawing on such diverse influences as Zurbaran, José De Ribera, Robert Longo, and Gerhard Richter, these works are allegories of limbo; figures suspended in space, neither flying nor falling. Each figure oriented upside down operates as a powerful metaphor for liminality, and depicts a state the artist feels is reflective of our contemporary moment — a condition of either potential triumph or of disastrous freefall.

Rostovsky’s paintings of statues continue this dual emphasis on the figure as both classical evocation and victimized body. Here the artist presents the classical form as amputated fragment, by focusing precisely on the absent limbs that characterize most classical statuary. Painted in a hazy, de-saturated palette, these paintings allude to a world of violence and degradation in as much as they channel a fascination with art history and traditional painterly motifs.

Stadium and Target meanwhile engage Rostovsky's longstanding interest in abstraction. Rendering the organizing patterns of a football field and of the curling ice ring respectively, these paintings double as modernist abstractions yet also point to the world of satellite surveillance and smart weapon targeting that has become such a mainstay of today’s visual culture, news reportage and electronic games. Similarly, Cat’s Cradle depicts the familiar children’s game of wrapping string around one’s hands in various geometric configurations. Within this context however, and given the stark Caravaggesque rendering of the painting, this innocuous image doubles as one of entrapment: an allegory of interdependence and of quagmire that references today’s political and economic arena.  

In these works and others, Rostovsky depicts our daily reality as rich with redemptive possibilities yet teetering on the edge of catastrophe. His is a melancholic perception literalized in the haze that has become characteristic of his recent paintings: as if the distance implied by this palette could serve as a metaphor for our own alienation and sense of withdrawal. It is a perception Walter Benjamin famously associated with allegory and melancholy in particular — a perception that sees history as a “petrified, primordial landscape” — as a muted spectacle, simultaneously monument and ruin.

Born in St. Petersburg, Russia, Peter Rostovsky lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He has exhibited in national and international institutions including: PS1/MOMA, ArtPace, The Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia, Santa Monica Museum of Art, Tacoma Art Museum, American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, NY, S.M.A.K. Museum, Ghent, Belgium, Museum Amstelkring, Amsterdam, Netherlands; and was included in the Prague Biennale, Czech Republic and Rauma Biennale Balticum, in Finland. Additionally, Rostovsky has exhibited at private galleries including: The Project NY; Elizabeth Dee, Salon94, Danese, James Harris Gallery and Gio Marconi among others.