Continuing through August 2, 2025

Contrary to the mood of the moment, the word of the day is ebullience. That’s right, ebullience. Given the grim political realities of the past two months, it is a word worth remembering and re-emphasizing, if only to counteract the mounting anxieties bred from the daily downward spiral of current events. It’s meaning is something different from flamboyance, which is drenched in theatrical and vulgar overcompensation. It is also different from routinely resorting to polite, etiquette-bound exercises in calcified taste and everyday denial that permeates too much of the Northern California art world. We can, or at least should leave that kind of work to Decorator’s Showcase, the San Francisco Art Fair, or the rug sample section of Bed Bath and Beyond. 

Ebullience is rare, all the more so because it is rooted in authentic joy, balance and clarity of purpose. It can be found in Peter Wayne Lewis’s exhibition of paintings executed from 1999 to 2023. 

The approximately 40 works here break out into three clusters.  First is the “Beijing Booster” series. The largest three paintings here all hail from 2009. One titled “Automatic Model” is a standout, consisting of three distinctly different painterly events dispersed against a white field as if they were different protoplasmic entities on the verge of interacting with each other. All are formed from diluted acrylic paint featuring a subtle wet-on-wet technique that makes the colors flow and sparkle. In each shape, the paint smoothy transitions from color to color, suggesting that special additives are incorporated into the paint medium to give it a radiant, pearlescent look. Even more important is Lewis’ decisive use of the white negative space surrounding the shapes. It is activated by their undulating surge through the picture space. The debt to traditional Asian brush painting and calligraphy is clear, especially the work of the 18th century Japanese Zenga painters. The key lies in understanding how improvisational serendipity and disciplined focus can operate in a balanced way to mutually support of each other.

A selection of smaller works from the same series are executed on paper mounted on linen. In these Lewis deals ever more directly with the dialog between an activated negative space and decisive gestures of acrylic ink that features subtle bleeds of differently diluted colors, looking like calligraphic characters, only more lyrical. They are made active by the way that Lewis changes the velocity of his brush, sometimes abruptly, gradually in other instances. Oftentimes these bleeds are decisive and dark, even as others are wispy and evanescent, made to look like barren pine trees shrouded in a thick fog. In these works, we get the clearest sense of how Lewis flips the appearance of his shapes from being spatially evocative to flattening into graphically blunt forms. They take our eye into and beyond the surface of each work.

Three smaller works from 2023 are collectively titled “Buoyancy “ (# 15, # 16, and # 17). Seen in this context, they relate to “Automatic Model,” except that the main painterly shapes intersect with each other in perpendicular overlaps that allow the colors to bleed into each other. Again, this effect is executed with an eye toward subtlety, looking a bit like Howard Hodgkin’s work from the 1990s as well as the aforementioned Asian sources. Two other works titled “Behind the Black Hole” (# 15 + # 16, 2023) are layered, concentric compositions that are less subtle and more expressionistic than the other series, all looking uncharacteristically angry. 

Twenty small paintings are from a series titled “Dreams” (all 1999) form the third cluster. These small (8 by 10 inches) works are all executed in thick layers of viscous oil paint that look like paint palettes uncannily come alive. Almost anybody who has taught painting can recall moments when they told a student that their palettes were better than the paintings that they were working on. The “Dreams” paintings seem to reflect that realization. They also harken back to the Japanese tradition of elevating particularly intriguing rocks or tree branches to the status of sculpture (Suiseki) because, like cloud formations, they can trick us into seeing things that are not really there.