Christopher Pekoc: Night Visions 1975-2000 @ Tregoning & Company 2/21 Bringing his early life experience of growing up in a family that owned hardware stores – with its multitude of drawers, cabinets and shelves full of pieces and parts – Pekoc developed an appreciation for assembling a collection of seemingly unrelated visual bits into his paintings and collages. Most recently the artist has been assembling pieces of reality, such as a photo of a torso, and literally stitching it onto dark, layered tones, overlaying it with more aged looking tones and lines. The effect is one of finding ancient, other-wordly medical diagrams.

These six smaller pieces featured at Tregoning & Company have a dark, thickness to them, in contrast to Pekoc's previous work.

The most striking works on display are on large canvasses and are created with airbrushed acrylic paint and/or pastels. In the middle of the gallery is a small plexiglass display showing how these larger works were conceived. In the case is a greeting-card sized collage made up of scraps of cut images and tone from photos in magazines and else where. Once the small collage is assembled, Pekoc renders it expertly onto the large canvas. You can see the realistically painted shapes and guess their origin; was it Coke spilling over ice cubes? Or maybe the chrome fender from a car ad? We'll never know. Put into their new visual context on Pekoc's canvasses, we see a moon scape, or an explosion, or maybe an abstract memory of jumbled hardware.

In his earliest days as an artist, Pekoc realistically rendered with pencil, but only selectively developed what he deemed the focus of the drawing leaving the rest of the face to fade into white paper. His later works are consistent with his earliest efforts, selectively choosing which bits of reality he wants us to notice, developing only these pieces, leaving out the details and original context, which gives the viewer and entirely new view.

Twenty-five years is a long time. A few rooms cannot hold his entire quarter of a century of creative works, but the shards of Pekoc's reality that are displayed in Tregoning & Company gallery allow us a peek into Christopher Pekoc's night world. This show will displayed until March 30th, at 1300 W. 78th Street, Cleveland.

From Cool Cleveland contributor Carol Drummond carolATdrummondesign.com
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