In the abstract paintings of Peter Gillies intense emotion is forcefully transmitted through swirls and sweeps of brilliant colour. Against a sparse background of marrow white, thick trails of scarlet and lemon slip and slide across the surface. The thickness of paint and the way it is superimposed and broken up and layered being a direct response to the artist's feelings - feelings which we experience through a vicarious sense of touch.

The paintings which he is currently showing in Exeter (before a September exhibition in London) all date from the last five years, the later ones being inspired by the Cornish coast and travels around Europe. They are the mature product of an artistic search which has seen Peter Gillies' work undergo several changes of style. Earlier studies of the Thames are delicate and impressionistic, their washes of pale blue and yellow suggesting a Turneresque interest in atmospheric effects. Also from this period come large, decorative abstracts full of rhythmic curves which at times suggest the mad movement of early Futurism.

Though no less dynamic his recent paintings have abandoned the lush patterning and Pollock-like allover activity that characterised the earlier work. These recent pieces still retain their references to nature but they are presented in a more emotionally direct way. Now the images are given more space and in several canvases a diagonal is established increasing the drama and unifying the composition.

This opening up of the picture space, rather than dampening the painting's effect, enables viewers to relish the clusters and splinters of dazzling pigment and areas of fevered gestural painting that make Peter Gillies' work, to paraphrase Joyce Cary, "a sort of coloured music for the mind".

David Ford, Art Critic
Arts Review Event South West, UK.

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Sintesi is the title of this exhibition. It shows syntheses in the single pictures and of different images, images of one and both artists and of painting and printmaking.

The canvases of Peter Gillies carry many layers of colour: painted, printed, written and montaged. Patches of paint, drawn lines, stained sheets of paper and written notes all interact with underlying or overlapping pieces of fabric.

Pulsating slowly or with speed, his imaginary spaces reveal a striking dynamic, both through the spur of the brush and the way the colour runs across the surface.

The dominant shapes are rectangles overlaid with lines like the tracks of the painting hand. With the included pieces of used paper and fabric, they remind one of inscriptions on walls or scribbled desks. You could see them as dancing notes, letters and colours.

North and south, pressure and floating, scripture and painting, the interferences of filled fields and empty spaces. The closed opens itself, the open gets closed, but both in a rhythm of giving and taking, of breathing in and out.

Theo Immisch, Art Critic Mitteldeutsche Zeitung
Curator, The Moritzburg Collection, Halle.

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Peter Gillies is an artist that loves Venice, and the works exhibited at the Galleria Sotoportego take their inspiration directly from this city. From its walls, from its graffiti, from its shimmering canals, even from the dark tracks that the rain leaves on its monuments.

Venice for Peter is better than any other city. He is fifty years old, an age that he considers to be the point between "being young and being old", "at fifty you're in the middle" and Venice is a point in the middle, between land and water, past and present, tradition and modernity.
The work constitutes a series of single images layered on paper which when grouped together form compositions of large scale using combinations of painting, printing, text and collage. Containing graphic signs, gestures, sketches and marks that evoke the fascination that the artist has always had for the degrading surfaces of walls, posters and billboards full of graffiti. The woven structure of his work involves map-like passages of writing which explore and record the time spent in Venice and together with colour and content suggest the fabric of the city: its frescos and mosaics, its shimmering buildings and their gilded interiors.
And so the paper with its fluorescent colours seems to really sing, you are left with the feeling that the author has truly experienced the sacred music of the Venetian Church or a jazz concert at the Evangelist school of San Giovanni or a 'Debussy' played by a Czech pianist in the hall of Palazzo Albrizzi where Peter exhibited a year earlier. In this operatic work Peter Gillies wants to recreate the movement and the intonations found in Venetian music, so that through the painting he not only listens but he also 'visits' the city.

Emotionally, it was for him also the contrast between the dark obscurity inside the church and the strong light of the clear spring-like mornings when the Venetian buildings are in full light splendour, a particular light that says the artist is "traceable only in Venice, a city of water that appeases itself on reflection" .

Nicoletta Consentino, Art Critic Pubblicazione di Venezia

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