Negotiations and Meditations

Colour speaks on its own terms the way a trumpet sounds its own notes…When asked to talk about the first influences on his paintings it is with the early work of Wassily Kandinsky that Peter De Lorenzo begins: the Blue Rider paintings in which colour operates more like music and those points of transition when the colour lifts itself away from what it starts out to represent and becomes something else, that’s what was so vital.

Negotiations and Meditations installed at Wollongong City Gallery in 2015

It could be said that this fascination with colour has not only informed the last thirty-five years of Peter De Lorenzo’s painting but also lies at the heart of this present body of work. Here the viewer is met, in one work, with an intense flicker of colour rippling across the surface of the canvas the way reflections in water are constantly shifting, while in another a stillness takes over requiring a more contemplative viewing. In both cases the potential for colour to evoke emotions is heightened by the fact that all external representation is excluded through the use of the grid. If colour can be employed in a way that parallels music then music also answers to mathematics and in turn to a set of geometries which orchestrate pattern and movement. The surface of the paintings are divided into evenly distributed units which relate both to the whole and the edge of the canvas. The initial decision is arbitrary, but from that point on the rules of engagement are set. The game is finished when the last square is completed. The strategies are minimalist, an interplay of two factors - colour and geometry - but the result is far from the cool intentions of minimalism.

excerpt from catalogue essay, Chantal Grech 2008