HYPERREALISM

Denis Peterson pioneered a new school of painting that he termed Hyperrealism. Hyperreal paintings challenge the viewer to distinguish between perception and illusion.

Hyperrealism confronts reality and imagination as a confluence of the obvious and the implied. The boundaries of reality in Peterson's paintings can be confounding as surrogate effigies – often crossing the thin boundary lines of our visual acuities and causing self doubt as to our questionable misperceptions and observational assumptions. Ultimately, they lead us to question the fallible spectrum of the limited human eye and its fractured optical perceptions.

As a counter culture school of painting, Hyperrealism incorporates an existential frame of reference that leaves little room for visual interpretation, and as such, effectively calls for a visceral response. Not unlike Impressionism, it questions the framework of one's trained powers of observation. It presents an altered state of reality through a meticulously crafted illusion, a quizzical juxtaposition of palpable visual tension and the more formalistic conventions of traditional painting. It leaves little room for imposing one’s altered sense of reality.

His provocative hyperrealist depictions further relate to the political and cultural deviations of societal decadence, its enigmatic imagery, and the aftermath of its tragic, ideological and insane consequences. Thematically, his paintings confront the corrupted human condition as a phenomenological medium that bears witness to historical evidence of the grotesque mistreatment of human beings in a convincing illusion of reality or hyperreality.

They bring the viewer into a new and profound vision of humanity through art.