In the Eye of the Beholder

Peter de Swart’s mesmerizing sculptures open up vistas of the artist’s vast intellectual and spiritual pursuits. His meticulously executed three-dimensional collages in the Bolinas Museum exhibition focus primarily on de Swart’s concerns with individual human identities and the impact of the point of view on perceived reality. His works are multi-layered – attractive at the outset, sometimes perplexing sometimes unsettling upon closer examination, and almost always built to be manipulated into different shapes or states providing deepening insights during the process of their transformation.

“I have long been fascinated by the ways we choose to see the world and, equally important, by the ways the world impresses itself upon us. For not only do we look out on the world; the world gazes at us and catches us in our strangeness, our posturings, our needs, our illusions. In our age of casual narcissism, this complex reciprocity is typically overlooked. And yet is seems to me that only when the world articulates itself inside us can we begin to see: a seeing that is attentive and alive to details (and the devil inside them), a seeing that labors and plays, exposes and hides in plain view. Hence, the craft-aspect of the work: before vision can become a vision, it needs to do the legwork. There is no free lunch. Without a genuine, persisting engagement the eye clouds over in misty, wishful musings, in lifeless abstractions, in sloppy self-assertions.”    

– Peter de Swart

Peter de Swart lives in seclusion in the hills of West Marin, where he has been making sculptures for the last twenty years.