At Rodolphe Janssen, Peter Sutherland tests the Law of Reversed Effect

 

It’s arduous to share the room with a cultural personality such as Aldous Huxley, and it’s even more arduous to share it with your wife, also if you are an experienced and talented artist such as Peter Sutherland: 38 year-old, born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, living and working in New York City at the moment, he was the first artist in residency at the Still House.

 

His series of photographs printed on perforated vinyl adhered to commonplace plywood panels have been circulating fast into the art circuit since the beginning of 2014, when three amazing flames were presented in a seminal group show titled “Strike(s)” at Nahmad Contemporary in New York. At that time we wrote that Sutherland’s flames were “a formal episode out of cosmology, or theory of any kind […] suggested by a struggling research of the nothingness”. Something has changed in the meantime.

 

Sutherland’s solo exhibition currently at Rodolphe Janssen in Brussels (until 22 November) shares the titled with a notorious theory by Huxley, known as the law of “Reversed Effort”.

 

“The harder we try with the conscious will to do something – says this theory inspired by Taoism – the less we shall succeed. Proficiency and the results of proficiency come only to those who have learned the paradoxical art of doing and not doing, or combining relaxation with activity, of letting go as a person in order that the immanent and transcendent Unknown Quantity may take hold. We cannot make ourselves understand; the most we can do is to foster a state of mind, in which understanding may come to us.”

 

Instead of dynamic red flames, at Janssen there are two monumental triptychs that picture mountains and the extraordinary wide sky above them. The exhibition’s introductory text says that they are referred to Nepal, the place where the artist’s wife is from. One the floor there is a series of geodes “dressed in” images of flames taken from a massive bonfire Sutherland once started at a Colorado ranch – also this information is provided by the exhibition’s introductory text. A third element is the images of mountain stickers applied on the gallery window.

 

Is therefore the conscious will of a man and a woman to spend their life together what they don’t have to try as hard as they can if they want to survive to themselves? Is the key of a successful relationship the lack of effort in promoting it, that is to say that “art of doing and not doing”? Of course Sutherland is not giving any answers to these questions, but probably an answer can be found in that uncontaminated nature and pleasant beauty the artist represents.

October 29, 2014