P E D R O P E S C H I E R A

Pedro Peschiera

If you cast your glance on any walls dirty with stains or walls made up of rock formations of different types, and you have to invent some scenes, you will be able to discover them there in diverse forms, in diverse landscapes, adorned with mountains, rivers, rocks, trees, extensive plains, valleys, and hills. You could even see different battle scenes and movements made up of unusual figures, faces with strange expressions, and myriad things which you can transform into a complete and proper form constituting part of similar walls and rocks. These are like the sound of bells, in whose tolling, you hear names and words that your imagination conjures up.

LEONARDO DA VINCI - from the "Treatise on Painting":

The effort involved in making an incongruous comparison may prove to be useful if we don't confine ourselves to one, but to a series of more or less well-founded analogies. In this case, it is not enough to use terms such as "walls" or "stones" to justify the parallel between an experience that should stimulate the imagination of the painter and a perception built from a concrete representation. Apparently, then, this should be enough to reject a doubtful comparison. However, one of the biggest problems encountered by the beholder in some of the paintings of Pedro Peschiera, is precisely to take into account that "murality" (without subordinating it completely to the other elements of the painting and not succumb to an empty, hypnotic or redundant appreciation without trying to see the "figures" that explain its importance.

Since 1988, the façades that cover the greater part of the surface of his paintings, that invade it almost entirely, obey to a logic that is perhaps incomplete, but without ambiguities: the architectural object has lost almost all its specific or functional qualifications, to the point that the mimesis which sustains these paintings' relationship with history becomes itself problematic. The reductionism, the plastic radicalization as well as the amplification of the motif that drove Pedro Peschiera - who previously worked arranging similar looking buildings in spacious, deserted, devastated spaces: A sort of tabula rasa with architectures that one could still link to the Early-Christian or Romanesque periods - to reduce the horizon which remains a special reference to illusionistic painting, to a minimum sign that barely allows us to perceive the chasm between real space and that of the painting are concomitant with the elimination of architectural vocabulary (door, window, frieze or ornamentation). Only the cornice is left, defining the top of the building, an oculus, a fantasized replica of the viewer's eye, but that paradoxically does not correspond to the vanishing point of the representation and a particularly dense brickwork that lends a sense of scale to the architecture, also determining together with the geometric joints of the façades, the mental and physical distance between the viewer and the canvas.

And it is precisely in this relationship to painting that Leonardo's "precept" ceases to be a paradoxical hypothesis. If the form seems loaded with meaning - in short let us say that these are religious buildings - no symbolic data, such as a cross for instance allows us to ascribe a definitive content to the experience. Likewise, the viewer is in a way obliged to refer to the essential features that Pedro Peschiera gives to most of his paintings, especially to those which he groups under the term "Manto" (Mantle): the frontality, the monumentality resulting from the disproportion between the façade, the background and the format, as well as the choice of half-tones, usually warm ones, conductive to a certain physical and psychological proximity, produce the effect of being enveloped. These characteristics, which Pedro Peschiera assimilates symbolically to the protective mantle of the Virgins of Mercy (in particular Piero della Francesca's in Sansepolcro as well as his Madonna in Monterchi), are evocative of the re-interpretation of pictorial and thematic tradition that his painting proposes: a specific religious iconographic reference is substituted by a wall, so that the relationship between the elements and access to a particular content may seem arbitrary and even suggest a nihilistic attitude. This real "arbitrariness" reflects the obstacle against which symbolic experience clashes these days; an obstacle that Pedro Peschiera strives to consider and measure, so as to give it its true dimension. This is the obstacle the viewer confronts and its sheer monumentality evokes, in a hyperbolic manner, the missing, but nevertheless massive evidence of a "meaning" that mysticism already had made an attempt to figure-out at the very moment it vanishes.

Yet, if the experience remains very uncertain, other works permit us to restore in an equally analogous manner, the scraps of transcendence that Pedro Peschiera yearns for. The accelerated perspective of his "Puits/Pozos" (Wells) may evoke a tomb and the void that comes from the tragic absence of mediation. Even more explicit, Pedro Peschiera's photo-engravings of 1991, reveal some of those "figures" which can be weaved on the surface of the façades his paintings depict. The opposition pairs - "flour/yeast", "waste/worth" - show how form is articulated, while insisting on the fragility of the discourse device that sheaths it. Some oppositions, are reversible and in other cases ("void", "an urn within an urn"), the formal difference depends only on the thickness of the typographical characters. With regard to the embossed white on white print "void", it is probably the most radical expression of the struggle between the symbolic experience and emptiness.

Related with visual poetry, these photo-engravings are in obvious contrast with the monumentality of the pictorial representation; they could even denounce the technical archaism and the regressive nature that has often been criticized of certain aspects of the "return to painting" that has emerged in the last fifteen years. However, this would be going way too far, as the tempera Pedro Peschiera employs, makes no allowances for any of the emphatic effects of matter that single-out and routinely mythicize this type of painting and also that in his case, representation is never a warrant for demonstrative subjectivity. Anonymous and austere, his technique is nothing more than the deliberately obsolete, almost awkward medium to convey a presence that the meaning of history has made so inaccessible and fleeting as the figures that an attentive meditation can discover in the stains of a wall. A form of humility that conceals an ambition which proposes to express in a continuous space that which modernity can only conceive in parataxis.

Philippe Cuenat
Genève 1992

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		Pedro Peschiera If you cast your glance on any walls dirty with stains or walls made up of rock formations of different types, and you have to invent some scenes, you will be able to discover them there in diverse forms, in diverse landscapes, adorned with mountains, rivers, rocks, trees, extensive plains, valleys, and hills. You could even see different battle scenes and movements made up of unusual figures, faces with strange expressions, and myriad things which you can transform into a complete and proper form constituting part of similar walls and rocks. These are like the sound of bells, in whose tolling, you hear names and words that your imagination conjures up. LEONARDO DA VINCI - from the "Treatise on Painting": The effort involved in making an incongruous comparison may prove to be useful if we don't confine ourselves to one, but to a series of more or less well-founded analogies. In this case, it is not enough to use terms such as "walls" or "stones" to justify the parallel between an experience that should stimulate the imagination of the painter and a perception built from a concrete representation. Apparently, then, this should be enough to reject a doubtful comparison. However, one of the biggest problems encountered by the beholder in some of the paintings of Pedro Peschiera, is precisely to take into account that "murality" (without subordinating it completely to the other elements of the painting and not succumb to an empty, hypnotic or redundant appreciation without trying to see the "figures" that explain its importance. Since 1988, the façades that cover the greater part of the surface of his paintings, that invade it almost entirely, obey to a logic that is perhaps incomplete, but without ambiguities: the architectural object has lost almost all its specific or functional qualifications, to the point that the mimesis which sustains these paintings' relationship with history becomes itself problematic. The reductionism, the plastic radicalization as well as the amplification of the motif that drove Pedro Peschiera - who previously worked arranging similar looking buildings in spacious, deserted, devastated spaces: A sort of tabula rasa with architectures that one could still link to the Early-Christian or Romanesque periods - to reduce the horizon which remains a special reference to illusionistic painting, to a minimum sign that barely allows us to perceive the chasm between real space and that of the painting are concomitant with the elimination of architectural vocabulary (door, window, frieze or ornamentation). Only the cornice is left, defining the top of the building, an oculus, a fantasized replica of the viewer's eye, but that paradoxically does not correspond to the vanishing point of the representation and a particularly dense brickwork that lends a sense of scale to the architecture, also determining together with the geometric joints of the façades, the mental and physical distance between the viewer and the canvas. And it is precisely in this relationship to painting that Leonardo's "precept" ceases to be a paradoxical hypothesis. If the form seems loaded with meaning - in short let us say that these are religious buildings - no symbolic data, such as a cross for instance allows us to ascribe a definitive content to the experience. Likewise, the viewer is in a way obliged to refer to the essential features that Pedro Peschiera gives to most of his paintings, especially to those which he groups under the term "Manto" (Mantle): the frontality, the monumentality resulting from the disproportion between the façade, the background and the format, as well as the choice of half-tones, usually warm ones, conductive to a certain physical and psychological proximity, produce the effect of being enveloped. These characteristics, which Pedro Peschiera assimilates symbolically to the protective mantle of the Virgins of Mercy (in particular Piero della Francesca's in Sansepolcro as well as his Madonna in Monterchi), are evocative of the re-interpretation of pictorial and thematic tradition that his painting proposes: a specific religious iconographic reference is substituted by a wall, so that the relationship between the elements and access to a particular content may seem arbitrary and even suggest a nihilistic attitude. This real "arbitrariness" reflects the obstacle against which symbolic experience clashes these days; an obstacle that Pedro Peschiera strives to consider and measure, so as to give it its true dimension. This is the obstacle the viewer confronts and its sheer monumentality evokes, in a hyperbolic manner, the missing, but nevertheless massive evidence of a "meaning" that mysticism already had made an attempt to figure-out at the very moment it vanishes. Yet, if the experience remains very uncertain, other works permit us to restore in an equally analogous manner, the scraps of transcendence that Pedro Peschiera yearns for. The accelerated perspective of his "Puits/Pozos" (Wells) may evoke a tomb and the void that comes from the tragic absence of mediation. Even more explicit, Pedro Peschiera's photo-engravings of 1991, reveal some of those "figures" which can be weaved on the surface of the façades his paintings depict. The opposition pairs - "flour/yeast", "waste/worth" - show how form is articulated, while insisting on the fragility of the discourse device that sheaths it. Some oppositions, are reversible and in other cases ("void", "an urn within an urn"), the formal difference depends only on the thickness of the typographical characters. With regard to the embossed white on white print "void", it is probably the most radical expression of the struggle between the symbolic experience and emptiness. Related with visual poetry, these photo-engravings are in obvious contrast with the monumentality of the pictorial representation; they could even denounce the technical archaism and the regressive nature that has often been criticized of certain aspects of the "return to painting" that has emerged in the last fifteen years. However, this would be going way too far, as the tempera Pedro Peschiera employs, makes no allowances for any of the emphatic effects of matter that single-out and routinely mythicize this type of painting and also that in his case, representation is never a warrant for demonstrative subjectivity. Anonymous and austere, his technique is nothing more than the deliberately obsolete, almost awkward medium to convey a presence that the meaning of history has made so inaccessible and fleeting as the figures that an attentive meditation can discover in the stains of a wall. A form of humility that conceals an ambition which proposes to express in a continuous space that which modernity can only conceive in parataxis. Philippe Cuenat Genève 1992
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