Denis Peterson
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Hyperrealist Denis Peterson is an Armenian painter whose early photorealist genre - Soft Focus Realism - was exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum in New York. Peterson was born on December 15, 1944 in New York City. His hyperrealism style utilizes airbrushed acrylic and polyvinyl paints. Images of figurative art in compressed space and incorporeal landscapes represent hyperreal visual commentaries on the aftermath of genocides.
These provocative hyperrealist depictions relate to the political and cultural deviations of societal decadence, its enigmatic imagery, and the aftermath of its tragic, ideological and insane consequences. Thematically, Peterson confronts the corrupted human condition specifically through his paintings as a phenomenological medium that bears witness to historical evidence of the grotesque mistreatment of human beings in a hypersphere or hyperreality.
Peterson’s work has focused on diasporas, genocides and refugees around the globe by utilizing hyperrealism as a vehicle for political challenge through visually disturbing images that represent both a moment in time and a human condition. The work has exposed totalitarian regimes and raised political and moral conflicts with third world military governments through hyperreal depictions of the legacy of hatred and intolerance. Subjects of this iconoclastic artist are statuesque figures and stoic faces that eerily seem to share an internalized calm in the face of the surrounding horrors of deadly disease, impending torture, terrorizing fear and irrational hatred.
