PETER BOGGS

Peter Boggs (b 1949, New Zealand), is one of the leading contemporary painters in Australia, with a career spanning over 50 years and 70 solo exhibitions. The award winning painter is at home painting the mysteries of Italian Renaissance gardens - most notably the Boboli Gardens in Florence, as he is in unveiling the secret and forgotten aspects of fast diminishing rural and urban landscapes. After coming across a strange empty room in a building in Italy in 2013, interiors began to dominate his interest - continuing to the present. Dreamscapes of remembered interior settings often only briefly seen and experienced, have become transfigured and re-imagined enigmatic spaces of stillness and silence.

In an age when time is measured in nanoseconds and information is conveyed in sound bites, Peter Boggs’s art may appear as strangely anachronistic with its emphasis on timelessness and distilled beauty. His art is a triumph of slow art. His paintings are generally quite small, exquisitely crafted, with their tonality and geometry beautifully resolved. In them, everything has been specially arranged and re-arranged to the point that any further change would be to the detriment of the whole. There is something that is very intimate about his art, even diaristic, secretive and seductive, but there is no explicit narrative. The paintings are not about something, there is no obvious storyline, but at the same time they are very meaningful, they denote emotional and spiritual realities and they do this through visual and not verbal means. His is the art of ‘visual’ rather than ‘verbal’ intelligence. It is quiet and meditative and invites contemplation in search of spiritual enrichment.