Metro Gallery

Using crashed World War II planes, as seen through the eyes of innocent children, the new body of work explores Michael's relationship with his two grandfathers, who both served in World War II.

Both men passed away within months of each other in 2010, prompting Michael to contemplate how little he knew about their lives and consider our inherited experiences of conflict across generations.

16 Photos

Dickerson Gallery

We all dream, whether in monochrome or searing colour, we all travel other realms during the somnambulistic hours of night. It is strange to think that not so long ago our first collective dreams – those captured in photography, television and cinema – were also black and white.

Michael Peck doesn’t literally paint in black and white, but his harshly reduced palette seems to share the same timelessness as those dream-images of old. He has the strangest ability to make the bleak truly beautiful. A part of this is, of course, purely technical – Peck clearly relishes the gradual and painstaking task of building up layer upon layer of paint, creating a depth that invites the viewer into his mysterious world.

Peck is, first and foremost, a narrative painter. These paintings could be read as film stills, moments of frozen time from a far larger saga. Peck’s reductive palette, one of deep grey-brownish hues, seems to force the viewer to add colour, to add movement in a world of utter stillness.

One cannot help but wonder what has created this bleached world. But strangely, one does not conclude that these are the end times, rather they are a moment of respite, a moment of in-between, a moment of contemplation.

Ashley Crawford.

12 Photos

Metro Gallery

In this world silence is a given. The birds hover, but they do not move. The world is in stasis; frozen in a moment of melancholy. The stillness palpable… the silence so intense that it becomes a sound in its own right, holding the grey mist at distance… but only just….

Michael Peck’s paintings act as stills in some portentous drama. The narrative remains a mystery, but we know this is not the world as we know it. The fog has bleached the colour from the fields and the trees. One might hope that the book holds the key. It is clutched tightly, like a sacred talisman, a way out, an escape from this monochromatic miasma. But when it is opened there is nothing more than total erasure, the pages so intense that the reader becomes irradiated, her features vanishing in a blast of forbidden knowledge.

Peck’s strangely luminescent landscapes recall old sepia-tone photographs. The focus is caught on strange moments, the blur of the trees at times hinting at fog or smoke as the little girl looks warily over her shoulder. A different kind of narrative is unveiled in Peck’s world, one that shares a strange aesthetic with moments from Alfred Hitchcock’s films merged with hints of the surrealism of David Lynch. The monochromatic palette, the strong whiff of a cinematic still, a sense of pause.

Excerpt from Silent Poetry, by Ashley Crawford.

11 Photos

Metro Gallery

Michael Peck’s paintings are a constructed blend of nostalgic imagery from the 1950s, an age of innocence, blended with the sense of foreboding darkness that we tolerate as the condition of our post 9-11 contemporary society. He joins images of a multiculturalism that position us in a present space that is global, familiar, yet impossible to locate. Whenever I am confronted by Michael Peck’s paintings the word that best describes my reaction is shock but the vagaries of this hackneyed term places his paintings in the same league as the styles of art that predominated in the Twentieth Century that are contrived so blatantly to shock their viewer.

This trend continues its evolutionary process with contemporary artists like the British artist Damien Hirst who have come to a public prominence that has emanated from the star system generated from the Turner Prize. The Turner Prize is a competition for contemporary artists publicized on prime time national British television that in the 1990s infused a languishing British art scene. The negative by-product of this publicity is that it birthed the assumption that to impact the mass public art must be increasingly shocking. Art has become equated with shock and the once already tragic notion of ‘art for arts sake’ has morphed into ‘shock for shock sake’.

Peck’s highly considered approach to painting contrasts with the work that is now rewarded by this undiscerning plebian system. Peck’s shock value relies on our society’s loss of innocence, on our expectations of what life should be but isn’t. We are confronted by our own denial, of a grief that we have laid dormant in order to cope with modern life.

Dr. Julian Warren

11 Photos

Metro Gallery

"The greater crisis of our lives is a spiritual one which affects all aspects of society including economics, technology and morality. The quality of our lives is tainted, and words such as alienation, despair, loneliness, in short, dehumanization, are all relevant and have to be used too often". H.R.Rookmaaker.

Isolation and displacement are central themes in the paintings I have chosen for this exhibition. Lone figures stand in vacant spaces; withdrawn, abstracted and enervated, each engaged in solitary pursuits. Seeking ways to understand and connect with their surroundings, these characters yearn to belong.

However, in each case there is a sense that their efforts, experiences and sensations are inhibited and somehow dislocated. Far from being pessimistic, these artworks seek to recognise, empathise and share the difficulties and uncertainties which are faced within a constantly changing society. Ironically there is an abstract comfort in recognition of this shared isolation.

The moments in these paintings have their genesis in reinterpretation. Old books, film stills, magazines, newspaper and found photographs are merged, juxtaposed and transformed. This practice allows me to create new contexts and explore possibilities for their inherently meaningful narratives. Although the stories are fabrications and distortions of a common reality, I hope they maintain the concerns of our real world.

Michael Peck 2008

10 Photos

Metro Gallery

These paintings are concerned with the sensation of disorientation and dislocation that is often felt within the post modern world. They focus on the individual and the influence and impact of the environment that surrounds them.

The participants in these paintings are quietly paused within a dynamic population; they are overwhelmed by mass-culture; one which has been composed from the interaction, assimilation and constant change of sub cultures.

These paintings allude to a pluralistic society where a constant shift of values and beliefs leaves a great uncertainty of belonging. This flux can mean the loss of meaningful direction and perspective.

Michael Peck

12 Photos