Charley Peters. Full Throttle

About

Charley Peters is a London based artist, writer, and independent curator. She makes paintings where abstract language and contemporary screen aesthetics collide, remixing familiar motifs from art history, retro gaming, TV and the Internet on works on canvas, walls and in public spaces.

Full Throttle, her new solo exhibition at The Foundry Gallery, London is an engaging installation of paintings and painted objects which reflect the graphically complex world in which we live, which Peters describes as a space “where we simultaneously see multiple ‘windows’ on computers, smartphones and digital tablets which display disparate images at once, each with their own temporal, spatial, and visual registers.” (1)

Full Throttle developed from Peters’ interest in the 1999 PlayStation 2 game ‘Driver’, in which you play as a driver in a series of car chases. Inspired by films such as Bullitt, a 1968 film starring Steve McQueen, The Driver (1978) and The French Connection (1971), the multiple views within the game capture the car moving through virtual fictional cities that feel curiously familiar. The pixelation that appears at the periphery of the screen (jaggies), gives the impression of a shimmering texture as your car speeds through urban city streets. The game isn’t attempting to be a new reality, but like Peters’ work it is an abstract version of an imaginary world, a hyperreality. 

In Full Throttle, alongside a suite of paintings on canvas are a number of painted objects - traffic cones and chain barriers - both of which appear as props to navigate and crash through in the game Driver to add drama and excitement. These painted objects create obstacles that we need to navigate to see the exhibition in the round. They also “acknowledge the sculptural potential of painting where most of what we experience is non-physical and seen on a screen.” (3) Hand painted vintage floppy discs and 3D prints of pixelated stars further reinforce the relationship between the analogue and digital in Peters’ work and the spatial potential of the painted surface, creating an interplay between flatness and sculptural form. 
 
Behind the paintings on canvas on the gallery’s walls, Peters has made a series of site specific greyscale wall paintings of graphic symbols reminiscent of road markings, signage and car dashboard icons, which interact with the gallery’s layout. As well as being suggestive of the language of hard-edge abstraction, they act as a framing device to the canvases, creating another level of dynamism, “You can’t compete with the architecture of spaces but it eventually becomes part of the work…it’s like a collaboration.” (4) 

Charley Peters’ work is characterised by dualities, positioned somewhere between representation and abstraction, and control and impulsivity. In Full Throttle, Peters has created an exhibition of exhilarating paintings and painted objects where she has taken the language of High Modernism and made it collide spectacularly with the aesthetics and pervasiveness of contemporary screen culture.