Aphoria, 2005, Oil on canvas.Extract from my artist's statement for the "Three Painters" exhibition at Howard Gardens gallery, CSAD, Cardiff, November 17th to December 11th 2007.
...Pepperell’s paintings form part of a wider philosophical challenge to a western metaphysics that has dominated our thinking on key philosophical problems but which he argues is now subject to fundamental revision because of new ideas emerging in the sciences and humanities. For example, we have to abandon the notion that anything has a beginning, or end; we have to recognise there are no objects in the world; we must discard the division between the mind and world (while simultaneously acknowledging it); we must accept that it is in the mind where all qualities and properties exist while also recognising that the mind is in the world.
By adopting some of the primary visual languages of western metaphysics (baroque, romantic and rococo painting) to generate images that are both visceral and spiritual, and in which objects are both present and absent, he asks the viewer to perceive the world as essentially contradictory and indeterminate. This is in opposition to the dominant western tradition, sustained by the ethos of empiricist science, which holds that reality is rational and deterministic.
Despite his scepticism about the scientific ethos, Pepperell’s work has recently been the subject of a number of scientific investigations by laboratories in vision and brain research at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, and the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Germany. Samples of Pepperell’s paintings were tested against a sample of art historical works, and audience responses to certain perceptual tasks were measured. A number of significant findings emerged, which have been published in peer-reviewed scientific journals.
