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May, 10, 2002
Pigments of imagination
Colors swirl with energy in abstract acrylics by Peter Bocour
By DAN BISCHOFF
STAR-LEDGER STAFF
ART
Peter Bocour, Recent Work
Where: RC Fine Arts Gallery, 499 Valley Road, Maplewood
When: Through June 1, 2002. Noon-5 p.m. Saturday and Sunday, and by appointment.
How much: Free. Call (973) 762-4656.
Peter Bocour, whose recent abstract acrylics just went up in the RC Fine Arts Gallery in Maplewood, says he was born into the art world. His father was the owner of Bocour Artist’s Colors, a small Manhattan manufacturer of artist-quality oils and acrylics.
"I grew up in the 52nd Street factory watching rivers, streams, ribbons of pure paint," Bocour said as he went through the final stages of hanging 17 easel-sized paintings and as many smaller drawings in the gallery. "I think I liked paint right away. It was the art world I didn’t like."
All those openings his parents took him to; all their artist friends. It’s shop talk if you’re born to it, no more interesting than the small talk of bankers or car salesmen. Besides, his father was quite conservative about art, preferring figurative artists who worked in a traditional, labor-intensive manner. "My father thought like a German. You started a painting by sizing a canvas with rabbit glue," Bocour says. "I wanted to be more spontaneous."
Bocour, 53, who has lived in Montclair for 12 years now, fell in love with painting only after he spent nine weeks at the artist’s colony in Skowhegan, Maine, in 1970. "That’s when it hooked me like a drug," he said. "It was like a huge infusion of energy, and I haven’t stopped since."
Bocour has been painting in the same gestural, abstract way all this time. He got a master’s in fine arts at the University of California at Berkeley in the mid-’70s, where he studied with Peter Volkos and Elmer Bischoff. Bocour showed at RC Fine Arts last year, too, and sits on the board of Aljira, A Center for Contemporary Art, which is awaiting finishing touches on its new home in downtown Newark this season.
The work in the RC gallery divides neatly into three groups. Ten larger canvases (including "Surge," "Haze" and the undulating "Ondine") on one side of the gallery represent pictures Bocour has returned to over and over again, some for as many as six years. Most are done on flat, pastel-tinged grounds, and involve masses of dark blues, siennas and yellows that tangle near the center of the picture.
Seven smaller canvases ("Man O’ War," "King Ubu," "Aviary") dispense with the ground and release an energy that flows across the whole picture, often by dragging pure ultramarines and hard yellows through slabs of thickened white paint. Bocour gels his acrylics until they suggest the layered colors of oil – acrylics cannot recreate a heavy impasto, but they can trick the eye into seeing it when it is not really there. Bocour manages this trick again and again.
Finally there’s a group of 17 drawings on paper, done usually in four pastel shades and smudged with the finger. Bocour says he finds it easier to pronounce the drawings finished, and some of that sureness shows. They are at any rate more spontaneous than the paintings, an advantage in gestural abstraction – they flow more freely from the artist’s hand, and register nuances with aplomb.
It’s the space Bocour’s gestures define in these paintings that draws the viewer, not unlike the way Abstract Expressionist brushstrokes are meant to draw you into internalized dramas. But these paintings are, ultimately, about paint. Rivers, streams and ribbons of paint.
The Star Ledger
COPYRIGHT © The Star Ledger 2002
Peter Bocour's natural reticence ends with his encounter of the canvas. The controlled exuberance of brushstroke, paint, and color, defies the circumscribed parameters of his art. Bocour practices a contemporary refinement of that once familiar form of painting called Abstract Expressionism. In his hands, however, the sensational brashness of original Ab Ex performance is controlled to the point where 'sensational' may now refer to vibrant color rather than the ambition of the artist. Mr. Bocour would rather pay attention to problems of his own art; his preoccupation is with controlling the practical and poetic density of a painting: how does a work gain intensity or plastic meaning by a simple touch of pink across broad swaths of blue and green? And how much is too much, how much is too little? Now, before a doubt, and without a doubt, these are the really tough questions.
Carl Hazelwood, 1999
