Peter Cain (artist) - Work

Work

Cain studied at New York's Parsons School of Design from 1977–1980 and the School of Visual Arts from 1980-1982. His early paintings derived their subjects from advertisements for rare and vintage automobiles, 1960s "muscle cars," high end sports coupes, and luxury sedans. He often began by collaging the source material to produce a distorted, abbreviated version of the car's original form. He then used these collages as studies for his paintings. In Pathfinder, included in the 1993 Whitney Biennial (1992–93, oil on linen), Cain merged the front fender and headlights of a black SUV with the rear third of the vehicle. The car’s hood, front doors and cab have completely disappeared, and the newly transmogrified Pathfinder has then been tipped up on its trunk against a solid white ground. Writing on a similar painting, critic Jerry Saltz said that the car paintings “cleverly question the nature of intelligence by presenting the image of a ‘thing’ that is knowable and unclassifiable in a painting that is like a filmstrip of a painting all collapsed and run together in to a single dense frame.”

In 1996, Cain turned his attention from cars to Los Angeles gas stations and convenience stores a year before his death. These landscapes are void of any human presence; Cain even erased logos and type from the numerous signs which inhabit such places. The face that greets Los Angeles car culture is eerily blank, and what can be understood as foliage is rendered in micro-faceted and hallucinogenic masses of green paint. The gas stations are spare in painterly incident, but redolent of narrative possibilities. When the Los Angeles paintings had their posthumous premier at the Matthew Marks Gallery in 1997, critics praised them for challenging the conventional wisdom that painting’s capacity to express genuine emotion was long gone. Peter Schjeldahl lamented, “I had trouble with Cain’s car pictures while being enchanted by the promise of his painterly gifts and ambition. Now we see the beginning of the promise’s fulfillment in the same instant as its end: an exceptional talent nipped in mid-blossoming, just short of full bloom. ”