Surrealist of the bland unconscious
Car seats, toilets, bars of soap, sinks and industrial tiles. These are the dominant subjects of
Jared Peters'
Just as it should be at the
McIntosh Gallery.
Toilet is indicative of the show as a whole. Muted in colour, geometrical but soft on line and sitting with slight unease in a boxy but not quite square canvas space. It's a lot of
not quite ball-in-a-box. Viewed from above, the toilet has only a subtle sense of depth. Like the sink in the painting beside it, the flattening wins out. With careful attention to the detail of floor tiles, it is also the decorative which dominates. This is only accented by the striking lack of any excretion in the toilet: just the twists of some paper rendered like the wrinkles of a shirt. While the clean/filth divide has been fairly overstated by anthropologists since at least Mary Douglas' seminal, if simplistic,
Purity and Danger, there is remarkably little of the latter in evidence. Instead, it's a world so decontaminated that the only sense of life is the murkiness of its colour scheme.
