CATCHING THE CAPE IN RESTLESS MOTION

BY CATE McQUAID
BOSTON GLOBE
AUG. 12, 2009

PROVINCETOWN—In her Cape Cod landscapes at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum, painter Anne Peretz ties the elemental quality of her material to that of her subjects. She adds sand to her paint as she paints sand dunes. But the topic is more than sand dunes. It’s erosion. Many of her canvases meditate on time and change.

Look at the rush of the unruly beach grass in “Truro Dune #10,” in which a dune rises in restless motion against the brilliant blue backdrop of a calm sea and sky. The dune seems more changeable than the sea behind it. This painting, with its sharp tones, is an eye-catcher, but most of Peretz’s other dune paintings keep to gray weather in works such as “Falling Dune and “Ballston Beach #2.” Peretz’s careful modulations of tone and the pull of a shrub’s exposed roots provide the drama.

Peretz, who founded the Family Center in Somerville, has developed a passionate second career as a painter. She often works on a large scale—up to 6 to 10 feet—athletically flinging, scumbling, and spackling her paint. Unlike legions of Cape Cod painters, Peretz doesn’t strive to evoke picture-perfect scenes, but usually turns her eye to humble subjects, such as the old, useless, waterlogged posts that once held up piers in “Provincetown Pilings.” They rise from gray mud and lean into each other like old friends who can no longer stand straight.

I love the intimacy of Peretz’s smaller-scale pieces, “Truro Pond #3” is all muddy green, its spackled surface delicious with rough dollops and pale, gathering light. It’s as if we’re neck-deep in the pond, watching the sun glint on its surface, sinking our toes in its mud. “Truro Woods #14” shows a grove of gray-green verticals beneath a canopy of daubed olive leaves. But a thick, peachy light marauds between the tree trunks; it has more substance, materially and tonally, than the trees themselves. These canvases, each just 2 feet square, are easier for a viewer to enter than the larger ones. Monumentality can be forbidding.

CAPE LANDSCAPES

BY CATE McQUAID
BOSTON GLOBE
NOV. 1, 2007

Anne Peretz’s gorgeous, athletic landscape paintings of the outer Cape are not pretty. Rather, they grapple with the ruthlessness of the land and the possibilities of paint. Her show at Pepper Gallery features confrontations with monumental dunes. “Balston Dune #3” rises over the viewer in a variety of beiges, and wonderful textures. Watery washes reveal the canvas’s weave; other passages look spackled on. The blue sky is as substantial as the sand.

Smaller works have more pictorial detail, but it seems almost incidental to Peretz’s engagement with her paint. She stumbles, streaks, and pushes it around in “Truro Pond #1,” where foreground reeds rise like licks of flame under the blunt horizontals of tree branches. She brings an Abstract Expressionist’s passion for the materiality of paint to landscapes.

ANNE PERETZ, SALANDER-O’REILLY GALLERIES

BY JOHN GOODRICH
THE NEW YORK SUN
JUNE 9, 2005

In some circles, a predilection for luminously scenic landscapes could be injurious to a reputation—all the more so when the painter favors mist-wrapped sites and a quietly expressionistic technique. In Anne Peretz’s recent paintings of New Zealand and Massachusetts shores, however, her earnestness seems directed towards goals much more interesting than the picturesque.

Ms. Peretz’s Zen-like simplification of motifs isn’t just a pose: Raw but subtle pressures of color work from within to give a palpable presence to forms—the spreading, foreground dunes of “Truro Dune #10,” for instance, or the crowding, teetering posts that stare back from the foggy mid-distance of “Pilings #4.” In “Milford Sound #3,” the drawing’s rhythm is so understated as to seem almost subliminal. Yet their rigor can be felt in the tiers of ochre’s and greens that cohere powerfully into the drama of a huge bluff.

Not every painting has such vital rhythms, and Ms. Peretz continually risks sentimentality. But in her pursuit of deeper appearances, the artist seems unconcerned about superficial ones. Many contemporary artists telegraph their intensity through shocking techniques or images, and here it’s bracing to see colors and forms allowed—trusted—to speak for themselves. After all, this may be the biggest gamble of all.

ANNE PERETZ: INDEPENDENCE AND LIGHT

BY SHAYNA SKARF
TIME OUT NEW YORK
JUNE 28, 2001

Peretz stands at a greater remove, literally and figuratively, from her subjects, concentrating as she does on pure aesthetic depiction. Her formal panoramas capture the cultivated hillsides around Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, and the rooftops of Jaffa, without a trace of religious, cultural or spiritual sentiment. In her serene diptych On the Road to Jerusalem, she makes use of a limited color range while keeping her brush strokes free and impressionistic. She layers arid colors with apalette knife to build textures, shaping hazy plots into geometric patterns. The result is a soft, painterly replication of topography. Likewise, the eye traverses the luminous Gabel Mukaver to Zur Bacher unfettered by symbolism, distinguishing misty horizons, meandering footpaths and the outlines of terraced Jerusalem-stone homes.

Peretz’s muted landscapes, which possess a kind of ascetic objectivity, require some patience; Safdie’s stunning compositions are immediately arresting. Perhaps narcissism plays a part in the seductiveness of Safdie’s figures over what Leon Wjeseltier aptly describes as Peretz’s “pure pictures of place.”