 | Peter James Smith: “My work gathers together phases of scientific endeavour by placing data, text, references and graffiti across an illusionistic visual field. The gathering of data, codes, signifiers and histories into a current woven text is a particularly post-modern stance. It provides the artist with a curator’s brief. It sits well with the scientist who creates new work by formally referencing the pioneering work of others in the field. In this sense scientists don’t ‘appropriate’, they build on the past.” (1)
“Smith paints with an enviable fluency in two abstract languages – mathematics and art – each carefully presented to perform a specific role in his Socratic argument. Both languages strive for elegance, but we are used to seeing them apart, so he uses vernacular painting to seduce. Then through his arcane scientific medium he delivers a sudden virtuosity of spirit. Together, they create a crisp tension of ideas, at once charming and vigorous, with painterly abstractions of land or skyscapes beneath the overlay of words or data describing the scene, often scrawled in blackboard freehand. …Huge, bilingual abstractions loaded with the emotional charge of each language, art and science: double-barrelled depictions that simultaneously bring us closer to the moment of the event itself, incidentally consider the languages we use and take us to the edge.” (2)
Peter James Smith is widely published as a mathematician and holds the degrees BSc (Hons), MSc, PhD with a Master of Fine Art in Painting. He is Professor of Mathematics and Art at RMIT University in Melbourne where he is Head of the School of Creative Media (photography, creative writing, screenwriting, film and television production, video production, multimedia, music production, digital art, computer gaming). His paintings are held in many public, private and corporate collections in New Zealand, Australia and internationally. In 2009/ 10 he was a New Zealand Art Fellow in Antarctica.
(1) Artist’s Statement, 2000.
(2) Keith Stewart, ‘Life Science’, Listener, 2 August 1997. | |
