Commentary
For Peter Hoss, the act of drawing is a force of nature. With the primal act of making his mark, this artist directs his physical energy onto paper. With an intensive process of revision, images emerge that evoke both the human body and the landscape. In Hoss's works on paper, the urgency of drawing yields a metamorphosis of form, whose expressive power is both real and mysterious.
Hoss works in a open, transparent fashion that allows the viewer to directly experience the movement of charcoal across the page, and the progress of the artist's mind at work. We see a line established, perhaps erased or whited out, and redrawn, and drawn again, until it becomes part of a complex, muscular architecture. Skeins of lines, whether slashing, roiled, or attenuated, become the living tissue of the artist's forms. Brutal or flowing, these forms constitute the topography of an organic, animated landscape.
To imaginatively enter Hoss's mixed media works is to participate in the aesthetics of disturbance. The viewer is plunged into a realm where powerful forces are at work, upsetting one's equilibrium. Black lines clash and change direction, as geologic contours erupt across the surface of the paper. Forms twist and converge, like bodies making love or war. There is often a doubling of forms, suggesting the intimacy of a struggle to dominate or to individuate. Shapes divide and mirror each other, or create masses with ever-moving internal systems of flow and stoppage.
Hoss makes literal the process of disturbance by collaging multiple sheets of drawings to make an integrated image that retains the evidence of its divided origin. The vestigial splicing of an image, the shift of paper stock, or a drawing's irregular outer margins all make us feel as if we are witnessing the aftermath of a seismic event has left the world both riven and born anew.
Peter Hoss engages in a process that brings to bear furious energies, both corporeal and psychic. This is the dangerous path that risks ambiguity, loss, and unnamed terrors to trace its way back to art's archaic wellspring, the dark currents of primordial chaos itself.
– John Mendelsohn
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