Peter Wegner at the Bohen Foundation

Art in America, Oct, 2004 by Matthew Guy Nichols

The verbose title of Peter Wegner's recent exhibition was writ large on an entry wall and read, in part, "Complete and Final Color Theory Superseding All Previous Theories & Preempting All Future Theories." While this statement confirmed Wegner's ongoing interest in the classification of perceptual experience, its authority was undermined by most of the 14 works in the show, which tend to invoke organizational systems only to break them down.

The ground floor featured large paintings based on hardware-store paint chips, whose color names have inspired Wegner for the past several years. His earlier enlargements of these miniature monochromes have given way to increasingly complex compositions, including Space, Time and the Weather (2003), which comprises 40 two-by-fours that lean against a wall in an orderly row. Each 8-foot plank appears to be wrapped with giant blue paint chips, so that stacked rectangles of color alternate with thinner strips of white. From the front, one enjoys a geometric abstraction, the wide spectrum of blues generating syncopated rhythms across a broad expanse. But an oblique approach blunts this optical pleasure by revealing fragments of each color's name, which are printed along the planks' narrow sides. Here, words like "Sky," "Rain" and "Tide" seem less poetic than predictable, and subtly speak to the descriptive limits of language and the impoverished imaginations of commercial paint manufacturers.

Analogous issues were addressed in the basement gallery, where several collages scrambled maps, multiplication flash cards and other inventories of knowledge. For Sentence Diagram (2003), Wegner chopped library index cards into small units before reassembling them as one large square. Precise yet incoherent, the beige grid opposes archival order to the boundless subjectivities of the written word. To similar effect in Alpha/Omega (2003), Wegner reduced an astronomical map to dozens of dimesized hole punches, which he then collected into a larger disk. By arranging the map's stars and planets in concentric rings, Wegner creates an outward ripple that suggests entropic forces counter our efforts to organize the world.

Wegner also presented two massive sculptures downstairs. Wall-to-Wall Reds (2004) is a 68-foot "ream" of red, wine and pink paper, turned on its side and wedged between two walls. Its companion piece, Floor-to-Ceiling Blues (2004), stacks turquoise sheets into a pair of columns. While their architectural scale may signal a new direction for Wegner's work, a play of control and chaos remains apparent. Vibrant color seems squeezed from the thousands of paper edges, as if escaping the tight confinement.--Matthew Guy Nichols