In Peter Mohall’s most recent paintings, the motifs combine landscape and still life. Vases of flowers are placed in relation to larger depictions of nature, either set directly on a rock in the terrain itself, or in front of windows so that nature appears in the background as a panorama. At first glance, the paintings are fairly faithful to both genres as they have developed over the past 150 years of art history. Aspects such as perspective, proportion and balance follow conventional rules. The colours, however, appear slightly more artificial, in the sense that they are so strong, saturated and clear that they almost tip over into something less naturalistic. At the same time, the motifs of the paintings must, taken as a whole, be said to give the viewer a kind of intensified experience of the colors and light of nature. In that sense, they fit into a tradition of landscape painting that is chromatically supercharged precisely to convey a feeling of how nature can be experienced as more intense than how it objectively looks.

When we look more closely at the paintings, we also discover a handful of peculiar details: small fields of colour, three-dimensional paint objects placed on the canvas. In some works, these are scattered around within the motif, while in others they are placed more systematically in vertical or horizontal sections, like the colour control strips at the very edge of the sheet when printing a book or a magazine. These small fields of colour are cast from acrylic composite and painted with egg-oil tempera, identical in size and format, and represent the various colours used in the rest of the painting. By creating an index of the painting’s coloration in this way, Mohall introduces an element of distance from the motif as such, and he reveals a more fundamentally analytical approach to painting as a medium.

The technical solution of using such cast portions of paint is also something Mohall has worked with before, in the non-figurative paintings he has called the Brushstroke Paintings, a series in which the cast brushstrokes were the works’ only painterly “content.” The role of the brushstroke in the history of painting is, of course, as these earlier works explored, the story of an entire mythology tied to the artist’s labour and to the relationship running through the artwork itself, between the physical work of making a painting and the artist’s inner life. Where the earlier brushstroke paintings largely referred to the expressive gestures of postwar abstract painting, these small painterly objects point to an earlier phase in the history of painting. Before the brushstroke fully acquired its “expressionist” meaning, it was central to the development of modern painting in nineteenth-century France. By gradually allowing the brushstroke to be more visible, painters within early modernism abandoned the centuries-old convention that brushstrokes should be invisible, so as not to disturb the effort of giving as naturalistic a picture of reality as possible. A visible brushstroke was a painterly flaw.

This is perhaps, more than anything, the history that Mohall refers to in his most recent works. Impressionist and post-impressionist painting works precisely in the contrast between what is painted “correctly” and what experiments more with how the eye objectively sees reality in relation to how we experience something visually. The paintings thus function both as actual still lifes and landscape paintings, and as a continued exploratory approach to the art form today.