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There is a singular, even odd, image among the recent exhibition of landscapes by Peter Simpson. it's called Read the Signs. A highway busy with traffic stretches into the distance. To one side of the road are two signs: one, an advertising billboard; the other, a cautionary yellow oblong-both without inscription, both without manifest content. Not even a blank sign signifies nothing. This highway is the road back to Melbourne leaving behind the vistas North-West of the city which the artist has sketched en plein air in the remaining images of the exhibition. This is the road by which the artist travels.
The blankness of these signs communicates the poverty of representation in a contemporary art indebted to the semiotic of advertising: images must be communicable to the viewer travelling in excess of 100kph. Art aspires to advertising else it ceases communicating altogether. In order to be perceived at high speeds, the message becomes elementary. The blank signs together warn the motorist of his impending return to a culture of vacant commercialism. "Slow down, nothing lies ahead".
The other images render views around Bulla and the environs in sketchy impasto, without too much obvious concern for the apparent crisis in representation foreclosing on the straightforward representation of subject matter, especially the landscape. Peter Simpson's images resist or repel the contemporary gaze which incessantly divides the image into the sum of its parts, like so many road signs strung out along a highway. In contrast, the image of the landscape has always required the complicity of the viewer in order to appear. Peter Simpson's landscapes are no different in this regard; the viewer is constituted in a positive- that is to