The canvas is not only a pictorial support where one can express oneself, but it can be a tool with which to experiment and generate a multitude of perceptual games, even with light. Available Light / Luce Disponibile is Peter Schuyff’s solo exhibition, running until September 28th, 2025 in Polignano a Mare at the Pino Pascali Foundation. The title of the exhibition already announces the artist’s creative process: making light the true pictorial material. A meaning that, while remaining underlying the almost symbiotic relationship between colour and geometry, highlights its transcendence, the fluidity in looking beyond, in overcoming the static nature of the canvas. As if light could make us speak, while remaining silent, explaining the intrinsic meanings of our free interpretation.
Peter Schuyff, “Eight Long”, oil on linen, 140 x 100 cm, 2023, courtesy Fondazione Pino Pascali
Curated by Michele Spinelli, the exhibition presents approximately fifty works: large-format canvases, painted in oil and acrylic, and a selection of watercolours on paper, smaller in size but characterised by an intense formal refinement. The exhibition does not present a chronological order but suggests an authentic retrospective that directs the viewer’s gaze to the hypnotic and psychedelic use of light, connecting different pictorial cycles and key moments in the artist’s production: iconic works from the 1980s, marked by labyrinthine patterns and optical illusions, and a particular attention to the most recent works (2020-2025), created between Amsterdam and Bari. In the selection, geographical location in the Southern Italy area is favoured, particularly Puglia, as a testimony to the artist’s connection with the Southern Italian art system. The choice to settle in Puglia, with its cultural and emotional character, marks a significant moment in Peter Schuyff’s path, testifying to a further phase of research in which the relationship with light and space becomes even more essential.
Peter Schuyff, “Untitled”, acrylic on linen, 230 x 167 cm, 1986, courtesy Fondazione Pino Pascali
The artist makes this symbiosis a starting point, leaving the field of visual perception open. His work is characterized using geometric shapes and the ability to create light and movement by applying thin layers of acrylic paint. His almost abstract imprint, however, intends to give shape to our thoughts. The interpretation is free, the processual optics follows its course, the light acts as a conduit for the cognitive process. However, colour also creates a suggestive impact: as if for the artist the tonal impact of colour had its own feeling, as in the paintings of Mark Rothko. In the artist’s works, the colour is spread and embraces the geometric space that does not delimit it but rather identifies it. This creates optical illusions that reshape the spaces of observation in a retrospective of balance between method and instinct. The paintings offer themselves as open spaces of perception, where the geometric order and repetition do not impose a truth, but suggest possibilities of meaning, always new and individual.
Peter Schuyff, “Untitled”, acrylic on linen, 230 x 167 cm, 1988, courtesy Fondazione Pino Pascali
But Henri Matisse is his point of reference. The father of French Fauvism spoke of the power of painting to generate light. It is no coincidence that one of his most famous statements is: «I do not paint things as I see them, but as I feel them». For Peter Schuyff, this has been his main intention from the beginning. It would therefore be an emotional painting that also takes another aspect into account: time, which becomes the subject of his works. In each painting, the gesture, reiterated with minimal variations, builds a plot that tells the time of painting and the interior time of their author. It is impossible for the spectator to establish when a work can be considered truly complete: only the artist is aware of this. The temporal dimension has suggested the expressive rhythms for the emergence of the works. The emotional evolution of the artist, seen in each work, is marked repeatedly and consistently, following the flow of the seconds. The aesthetics of dynamism, in his works, also presupposes an evident optical illusionism. The artist can generate visual vibrations typical of that dynamism dear to Optical Art. Linked to the perception of the phenomenon, Peter Schuyff remodulates the shades of a colour that varies and is applied to his own structural conjectures, with the aim of creating a rainbow of meanings, characterized by a performing light that accentuates its dispersion and stimulates the sight. Light is the result of all its combinations.
Peter Schuyff, “Untitled”, oil on linen, 100 x 140 cm, 2019, courtesy Fondazione Pino Pascali
It is no coincidence that the artist, in the past, came into contact with the Neo-Geo group, an artistic movement that began between the late 80s and early 90s, which reacts, with a biting irony, to the logic of minimalism and conceptual art. Characterized by the rejection of traditional forms of painting and sculpture in favour of a wide variety of innovative media, including photography, video, performance and installation, the Neo-Geo movement began to develop an art that tended to give greater emphasis to the process rather than the product. As the curator suggests, through Available Light / Luce Disponibile a visual journey is offered that creates a bridge between structure and fluidity, between order and randomness, confirming the value of a painting that never ceases to question the gaze, the fruition and the surrounding space. It is the light that illuminates without making judgments, indeed it makes itself looked at precisely because it exists. Light, therefore, represents the verb of Peter Schuyff’s works. It should not even be explained; it can only be chased. The “available light” is not only an optical condition but is the access key that predisposes to freedom of vision, to the transparency of the creative process. In an era in which the human species is often controlled by artificial intelligence, the author claims a free, natural, unmediated light: a form of gentle resistance, which coincides with a return to the essential.
Peter Schuyff, “Big Four”, oil on linen, 150 x 150 cm, 2023, courtesy Fondazione Pino Pascali
At the same time, a project space, Peter Schuyff – Painted Boxes, will open at Exchiesetta, the small chapel of Santo Stefano in the historic centre of Polignano a Mare, with works created exclusively in his seaside studio-home in Bari, during the difficult second lockdown for Covid-19, in which the artist painted the boxes that had previously contained his work materials: dozens of polychrome towers emerged that tenderly enveloped him during the days that always flowed in the same way.
Emanuele Mazzilli
Info:
Peter Schuyff. Available light / Luce disponibile
curated by Michele Spinelli
30/05 – 28/09/2025
Fondazione Pino Pascali
Via Parco del Lauro, 119 Polignano a Mare (BA)
www.fondazionepascali.it
Art historian, performer, and art lover. Always passionate about contemporary art, he dreams of becoming a professor in the future, while still pursuing his artistic passion. He believes in the therapeutic value of art, which can save the world!
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