Color and Form Take and Make a Holiday

On the seemingly festive face of it, Roland Petersen’s art currently fills Solvang’s Elverhøj Museum with bursts of color and rhythm well-suited to the forthcoming holiday season. Petersen’s exhibition, The Visual Feast, lives up to its title, in terms of its prismatically bustling scenes of people at rest and in search of escape — in riverfront and lounging scenes suggestive of the late 19th-century playgrounds of such painters as Renoir, Manet, and pre-Modernist picnic chroniclers.

But breezing through the gallery while in a holidazed mindset, as one component of the cultural riches of the Elverhøj Museum’s other displays (and gift ideas), one might easily overlook a certain darker, more introspective subplot in this art. Distracted and abstractly configured figures in the generally leisure-timed scenes of these paintings touch on a certain “other” aspect of holiday consciousness: the holiday blues. Airs of alienation and existential detachment lurk behind the shimmering surfaces of this art.

Veteran Danish-American painter Petersen made his imprint in the Bay Area and taught art at UC Davis. We can readily detect similarities of approach to geometrical aspects and palettes of such fellow Bay Area artists as Richard Diebenkorn and Elmer Bischoff, but the art historicist parallel impulse influences our appreciation, finding echoes of early Modernist Fauvism on the visual menu. Petersen also studied with Hans Hofmann, whose signature geometric abstract language shows its impact in his student’s style.

In short, the complexity and nuances in his personal stylistic voice gives Petersen’s work its distinctive touch and feel.

Petersen has explained that, in his paintings, “I deal with color relationships, which I try to think of as a sequence of colors that have a kind of rhythm going, as in music. And I try to deal with changing that rhythm upside down, inside out and in any way that I can vary that. The kind of feeling that I am trying to achieve in my work is pretty much a kind of isolation of a person being alone in his own thoughts.”

Visual schemes are deceptively at work in these pieces, with strategies varying by the painting. Facing the gallery entrance, “Woman on a Horse” finds a bikini-clad woman rider on a horse, with a small rigidly posed dog facing the opposite direction and charging the compositional tension. In “Enjoying the View,” figures at leisure are posed in a stiff manner, partly serving as formal pillars and painterly props in the dense-but-tidy organization of the pictorial space.

A similar blend of detachment and explosive color outlays evoke the orderly cream scene-making of Alain Resnais’s classic film Last Year at Marienbad. The figures seem half-real, half-decorative or dream-conjured. Linear logic and clenching forces give life to “Rowboat for Two,” a balance of angular lines in its striated horizontal layers and the mirroring diagonal lines of the rower’s oars and a surreal tilt of a rainstorm overhead.

In the back corner of the gallery, we run into a large anomaly of a painting, compared to the dominant and coherent strain of works elsewhere in the space. Slyly but aptly titled “Courtship of Two Shadows,” the painting involves a pale checkerboard ground in tilted perspective, with two gregarious splotches — or puzzle-piece-shaped gestures — splashed atop. Consider it a madcap twist on Mondrian.

Also, we might consider “Courtship” the most unexpectedly cheerful painting in a fascinating show whose relevance to holiday consciousness goes dark and light. Petersen’s Visual Feast teases the eye and mind, while sneaking a questioning spirit into the nog.

Roland Petersen: The Visual Feast is on view at the Elverhøj Museum in Solvang through January 5, 2025. Located at 1624 Elverhoy Way, the museum is open Thursday through Monday, 11 a.m.-5 p.m. See elverhoj.org.