To some degree we are all products of our own environment. We simultaneously occupy a state of mind and an actual physical space and our perception of the latter is inevitably influenced by the former.
Mariano Costa Peuser, through his conceptually rigorous strategy and precisely defined forms, transports the viewer into a fictitious space, yet it is a realm we recognize easily and one we are entirely comfortable with.
In his new Anti-Art Man Series, Peuser has created a vision of his struggle to find a place in the art world. He adopts the iconic articulated wooden dummy, used as a model by artists through the centuries, as an ironic self portrait or a symbol for “everyman,” doing so primarily as a means for depicting the absurd nature of the commercial art market.
Two distinct vocabularies appear in Peuser’s digital prints mounted in Plexiglas shadow boxes ranging from medium to large scale in size.
In his images the wooden dummies interact with empty picture frames representing the art market. Although the two distinct elements might seem incompatible, the artist neatly synthesizes them with unbridled imagination to create something new.
The works are monochrome in nature and configured inventively, both reducing and enhancing the complexity of the interaction with the innocent figure of Peuser’s “everyman” posed within and around increasingly abstract tangles of the empty black frames.
His enigmatic stick figures sit, lean against, balance on or lay prone atop rectangular black frames. Often the frames are stacked to form buildings in which the wooden models are repeated again and again, at times appearing like drones vying for supremacy in a hive.
Peuser employs Photo Shop seamlessly to create his elegant compositions. In them a cut and paste mentality is used to tease, charm and seduce. His images exude an effortless sense of internal logic easy to appreciate while difficult to achieve.
In one work a solitary wooden dummy struggles with Sisyphean determination against towering angular wooden beams. In yet another, the lonely figure mimics Atlas bent under the burdens of an uncaring world.
In a piece titled Migration, Peuser creates an impenetrable barrier from angled picture frames over which a horde of his stick figures swarm like ants to hurdle a soaring divide.
The arresting image not only alludes to the challenges an artist must overcome to scale the heights of their profession, but to the hot button issues many immigrant artists laboring to earn a living in the United States must endure.
One image depicts thousands of the wooden beings orbiting in a circular mass against a black void. At the lower half of the composition, a few stragglers are peeled off from the swirling sphere; plunging limbs akimbo into the menacing darkness where the silhouettes of black picture frames vaguely appear.
Peuser’s enigmatic “Anti-Art Man” often balances on the edge of a frame like a circus acrobat. At times he appears with a hand across his featureless brow anticipating the unseen. Occasionally they seem to jerk chaotically in an exponentially evolving matrix, hoping to stand out in the crowd.
Peuser’s work also hints at the boom and bust of the local construction industry as well. Not to mention the intricately linked expectations of the local art scene.
With a chilling economy and muted and subtle subject matter Peuser has managed a compelling narrative and power of expression in his works that makes innocents of us all without sacrificing complexity.
Perhaps what astonishes most is that he has done so employing the most basic of elements, a dull blockhead dummy of all things, to create a vision of lingering psychological effect.
Carlos Suarez De Jesus, Art Critic
