'Square - Eyed' When I was young, sitting inches away from the television screen was a reliable way to make something happen for my eyes. My paintings, my work generally, has always come from similarly reliable recipes. I get up real close and sit very still until something happens". Peter Schuyff, 2022

MASSIMODECARLO Pièce Unique is pleased to collaborate with Peter Schuyff for his first exhibition with the gallery.

This presentation features two works from 1987 and two from 2022, exactly 35 years after Schuyff’s first exhibition with Lucio Amelio, in his Neapolitan gallery, and before the opening of Pièce Unique in Paris in 1989. Schuyff’s career began in New York City in the 1980’s: as a resident of the iconic Chelsea Hotel, he is regarded as a key member of the Neo-Geo movement, which addressed the mechanization and commodification of the modern world with as much gravity as humor.

Sol Lewitt, Piet Mondrian and Agnes Martin’s abstract minimalisms have had a profound impact on Schuyff’s approach to making art, prompting him to limit his role as a subjective painter as much as possible, to create works that are exactly what they are: color, patterns, repeated mechanically according to one initial guiding principle.

Schuyff’s geometric abstraction seeks to be as “anti-conceptual” as possible. A little bit like his ritualistic sitting too close to the TV screen – he allows these mind-bending, geometric patterns to appear in his vision, to then reproduce them on large-scale canvases. By limiting his responsibility as artist, he reaches a new balance between constraint and freedom.