With his exhibition entitled, The Next Next, Gordon Peterson continues to study the language of painting, implementing an ongoing conceptual strategy that entails visually quoting one of his own, earlier paintings which, in the function of repainting it again and again, mines persistent gestures and subtle fluctuations in structure and colour. Each successive painting is informed by the developing reflex and compositional shift played out in the one that came before, culminating in a kind of collective anatomy of an image.
Liberated of the obligation to repeatedly determine subject matter, the seventeen paintings comprising the exhibition become expressive of “practice,” not simply in the way of disciplined approach, but in the larger act of painting itself. Peterson is able to linger at the threshold of myriad decisions inherent in the process of taking brush to canvas—gesture, density, layering, tone, contrast, texture—and in the cumulative suite of paintings is afforded the chance to determine different outcomes as a result of differently combined solutions. With this exhibition, Peterson also undertakes an expanded field for painterly deliberation by enlarging the scale of the canvases toward the end of the series, probing further the durability of the subject composition.
Gordon Peterson lives and works in Toronto. His work has been exhibited in several solo and group exhibitions, including the Winnipeg Art Gallery, Winnipeg; Plug In ICA, Winnipeg; and G Gallery, Toronto. His work can be found in public collections such as the Winnipeg Art Gallery, the Province of Manitoba and the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Manitoba.
  
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