The Brooklyn Rail

Peter Wayne Lewis’s paintings in the exhibition Monk are about the precise moment of contact between brush and canvas, between the painter and the singular moment in time in which the image is born. In this way the work is improvisational in the best sense of the word and the metaphor of jazz which the artist implies in his title, Monk. There is preparation, but not planning. As a corollary to this, there is a vocabulary of form which Lewis employs, disembodied pupil-and-irises that glare at the viewer like the false eyes on peacock feathers or the Gladeye Bushbrown butterfly’s deceptive wings. There are emanating, meandering line segments, splashlike dots formed by a multiplicity of pigments loaded on a brush, knots of convoluted line, and finally broad brush strokes of varying density that lay down a fundamental bass line or beat.

This repository of significant form occasionally veers into a trippy familiarity with organic objects. Along with the aforementioned eyes, the wide strokes become tongue-like as in False Vacuum #3 (2015), where a red lugubrious gesture festooned with gray dots seems to dangle from the top of the canvas, like an elongated strawberry or a giant toad’s tongue covered with flies. In Bending Time Diptych #7 for Ms. Aretha Franklin (2018), a cloud of dots hovering around a green brushstroke, and banded by a series of evenly placed curves, becomes the fantastical head of a pussy willow. This all makes sense: Lewis is fascinated by string theory and physics, and so his practice seems to oscillate between two giants, his spontaneous and liquid placement of paint recalls Howard Hodgkin while the obsession with tortured line segments and buzzing swirling dots recalls the muse of nuclear-age abstraction, Mildred Thompson.

In Monk, Lewis is painting in series: the exhibition is primarily comprised of two, “The Bending Time Suite” and the “Monk Time Suite,” and he playfully positions one against the other—much to the benefit of the viewer. “Bending Time” is about space, while “Monk Time” is about pattern. Placed on opposing sides of the gallery, “Bending Time” is further divided into yin and yang. Yin resides in the heavy depths of some rich velvety blue demesne—it’s easy to make references to jazz! In Bending Time Suite #5, #1 of 9 (module) (2018), Lewis’s leitmotif of broad strokes are rendered in viscous and glossy black paint which at times is almost indiscernible from the blue. Lighter dots and strokes flitter over these foreboding undercurrents—the sensibility is very squid and whale (the vitrine at the Museum of Natural History, not the movie). In Bending Time Suite #3 Yang #4 of 9 (module) (2017), the format is almost identical, but the palette is reversed. The background is white, the broad strokes are pale yellow, and the lines are light gray—a very thinly applied wash. The contrast is stark—the background glares at us, and the effect is that of looking at the landscape seen in a drop of pond water through a microscope. The composition teems in Yang, and looms in Yin.

In the Monk Time Suite (2013), Lewis dispenses with gradation and tone, instead starkly imprinting his vocabulary of form in solid and punchy blues, reds, yellows and blacks. The canvases are also placed edge-to-edge, forming a much larger surface, totaling fifteen rectangles. The effect is that of a quilt or swathe of patterned fabric. This unity is further heightened by the artist’s decision to place the bottom row of five canvases on the floor. It’s a risky gesture, and a neutral one as the continuity of the whole is balanced by the act of looking down at painting, which isn’t my favorite activity. Monk is aptly named: Lewis sets a amiable pattern of color, form and painterly texture in each of his series, but isn’t afraid to mess with the viewer with subtle, dark, and threatening subtexts, uncomfortable angles, and trippy details that surprise us, and force us to look again and more carefully.