Bo Petran's Untitled

An endearing quality of this work is that it "opens up" over repeated viewings and rewards the observer with a rich variety of visual associations.

The first time I viewed this work, it appeared to depict lotus leaves floating on a pond. At a subsequent viewing, it reminded me of air bubbles rising to the surface of the ocean...

As I write, the pearlescent blues and whites remind me of the interiors of dessicated mussel shells.

Each disk-like shape in this work is a little patch of wax and pigment which has been blasted and dispersed by a hot air gun. These shapes are "stacked" and orchestrated in an "all over" manner.

This "all over" compositional strategy, loosely based on a grid (imagine a square around each disk), suggests that this work is indebted to the most significant art movement of the 20th century, Abstract Expressionism.

I've always thought that Bo uses Abstract Expressionism as a point of departure rather than as a destination. His works are far more personal in scale, more idiosyncratic in their mark making and more suggestive of natural phenomena.

The two colors in this work are used primarily as light and dark values. The contrast and tonal shifts between them define a shallow (essentially planar) topography closely allied with the picture's surface.