About the Exhibition

Furrows. Groves. Ravines. Streams winding through high valleys. In the immense landscapes of Peter Krausz, the eye is lost in the meandering scene. Between the dust of the dirt roads and wheat in the wind, Krausz depicts steep rocks with impetuous wash. The vegetation has been rendered flat to allow for variations in the landscape to be seen. The use of flowing brush strokes makes the hillsides green, the undergrowth glow and above the slopes, the skies evanescent and moving.

The bucolic aspect of these landscapes is overthrown by the juxtaposition of other images: views of abandoned open pit mines.

These views translate as desolate visions of places rendered sterile. Elsewhere in strident colors, the widening of the terraces along the open spaces of the crater creates sinuous rhythms. Water that is suspected toxic spreads in puddles to form lakes. The earth is disemboweled, ransacked. The panoramic vision of a pastoral nature mastered for generations is confronted with that of a devastated world whose scale now gives us vertigo.

-René Viau, art critic, curator and author