Eidetic Specter: The divinely profane Art of Peter Eide
By Kristofer Heng 

You have to laugh. It’s the first thing I do when I see a work by Peter Eide. Or is it more of a nervous grin? A chuckle hued with sarcastic undertones? Or a smile caught in euphoric Day-Glo? The glow from Eide’s wall of irrepressible colors will have you dying of laughter as you work your way into a new heaven, that is, if you can beat back the voices of gnawing naysayers of the art world’s persistent pedagogical paradigm. A stringent ideal, I am still attempting to resist and understand something of why we so readily cling. But the one thing I do know for sure, is that involuntary laughter as a response to and when faced with a new dissensus in the world is not just some trivial release, but is a way of embodying the tension of our constant ontological process of negation, or maybe I don’t know that for sure, but it’s a hunch I have and I believe Eide’s work brings these notions into sharp and sensual profundity.

I should lay some groundwork first and confide that Eide and I are both artists of similar age, cultural backgrounds and are both queer and in long-term committed monogamous relationships, which isn’t to say that we are queer in all exactly the same ways, but that perhaps one of the instantaneous affinities I feel in his work might be related to my being queer. We’ve also only just met really, having shared only a handful of conversations in studio visits and video chats, as well as in written correspondences in the form of email exchanges and sporadic textings. One of the anecdotal things I’ve gleaned in this short time, is that he has a tattoo of the painting by Francis Bacon’s, Study After Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X, covering the entirety of his back, not because he’s shown it to me, but from piecing together things he’s said and from seeing Eide’s own paintings that contain self-portraits where his back is visible and the Bacon portrait can be seen at various angles and degrees of obstruction. Beholding a painting of a naked Eide who is holding a painting with his tattooed back turned toward the beholder, as I stand next to Eide in person in his studio, strikes me as a beautiful conceit on how it is to get to know Eide and his work. His generosity lies not in any full-scale disclosures he reveals about himself per se, but rather in his sharing of the experiential resonances of how it is he makes the work he makes. The work of which many say is violent, crass, vulgar, debased, all of which might be true, but as Francis Bacon is quoted responding to those very same critiques, “Some people say my paintings are violent, but a painting can never be as violent as life”. 

Eide’s image repertoire is distinctly American. A Helter Skelter atomic bomb of orgies, stabbings, antics and excesses. Sundry items such as cigarettes, pianos and salads rendezvous with gender non-conforming beings, crescent moons with faces and the cult of celebrity, all of which give and take pain and pleasure with absurd abandon. Everything is rendered in quick outlines and elemental forms almost as if there’s an urgency to transcribe something before it vanishes from view. Eide’s cartoonish simplicity is a frenzied exuberance pushing almost beyond the point of containment of the canvases’ rectilinear plane. Space, in Eide’s paintings, act as backdrop, substratum, a stage upon which the figures and their actions are at the forefront, acting together as repoussoir and limelight. It’s a visual adrenaline rush, rudimentary and refined all at once.

To say Eide’s work is maximalist could be an understatement. It is, at times, hyper maximalist, almost squeezing you out. As Americans, we feed on excess, deeply rooted in our ingrained mode of scarcity and hustle culture, we are looking for more at every turn but at every turn we are also terrified. D. H. Lawrence, the angsty British novelist and essayist once astutely observed: “The English, and the Americans following them, are paralyzed by fear”, all manner of fear of one another. And in Eide’s paintings, there are no idealized places of PC pluralism, but rather a motley mix of heterogeneous abundance. 

In Eide’s earlier works circa 2014, a painting called, Long Pigs, three figures are seen, one of which has a hamburger for a head, riding a centaur, while many other figures are in moments of either pain or ecstasy, or both, in a tableau reminiscent of Hieronymus Bosch. In contrast a painting titled, The Time Has Come, is a Dali-esq hallucination, where a grandfather clock holding a glass of champagne, is boredly fucking, or being fucked, by a figure masked in one of Clive Barker’s Cenobites from Hellraiser, no doubt, also inspired by Francis Bacon’s smiling toothed horrors. In more recent works, Holy Mountain Tabasco Slut Fuck Pirate Hand Job, from 2021, is a watercolor-marker on paper with three high-heeled figures standing on a meadow of flowers with erections behind product packaging of Tabasco sauce and a movie poster for Alexandro Jodorowsky’s Holy Mountain. What is evident from even just these three pieces is how Eide builds up his works through collision. He says his process involves using search engines to dig for references, but also that he likes to click on the weird or “off” things that come up, the wormholes, the knock-offs, and the algorithmic glitches.

In an oil painting called, Churning Butter (Marge in Charge) 2021, Marge Simpson can be seen sitting on her kitchen counter with the window open, she has a large erection and is tending to it herself. But what I notice most, oddly enough, are the two round dots in the upper corner to Marge’s left. They are what you see on your phone when you view images from a Google search. These two dots are ghostly specters, haunting the image in this moment, suddenly I’m brought out of this Marge fantasy and realize this is a cropped screenshot from a found image on the Internet, a lá some Simpson fan art porn wormhole. And from Marge’s exhausted looking face I can tell she to is haunted by it. We all are Marge, we all are.

Eide’s work is the embodiment of a process. He doesn’t set out with any preconceived whole image in mind, instead he pulls, builds, reacts, posits and fills, much like the behavior of his figures, in order to create something through modularity and spontaneity. The sexual elements are an abstract visual rhythm saturated in color and candescence. Eide insists that the work doesn’t define who he is, that instead it’s about a dialog with the world. This is a call for the artist as interlocutor, a conduit between worlds and states of being. The state of being within our hyper commodified, hyper suspect American dream.

Of hyper-commoditization’s effect on society, Walter Benjamin wrote, “If the soul of the commodity which, Marx occasionally mentions in jest, existed, it would be the most empathetic ever encountered in the realm of souls, for it would have to see in everyone the buyer in whose hand and house it wants to nestle.” In an installation of Eide’s paintings and novelty cardboard cut-outs used in stores for product promotion, at Rope, Baltimore 2017, there was a small painting wherein the Sunny D logo hovers in a dawn of light beneath a levitating Linda Blair in a scene from The Exorcist. Bright as day, here is the commodity’s empathetic embrace, with the hope of salvation’s deliverance. Religion and pop culture both function in ways that keeps you in perpetual anticipation of desire and reward, and they both bring with them hopes of eternal life, albeit in different ways. The way Eide does it is through his profound use of color and saturation. A color regime most often found in cartoons.

Cartoons have a long history, and one of its ancestries is from political satire illustration, which became a way to “get away” with critique through the exaggeration of form and fact. Incartoons, personality is informed by movement and the physical comedy of the figures become modes of embodied transference. In Eide’s work, the cartoon functions simultaneously to buffer and heighten the intensities of shame, terror, joy and ecstasy. This cartoonish violence is a break from reality that returns you to a feeling of yourself in the end, making you question why it is you respond the way you do, a version of critical distance not often recognized or legitimized in the art world, which can make it all the more exciting to behold.

This aesthetic method of expurgation through art is what the late Dave Hickey describes in one of his essays in his book Air Guitar, called “Pontormo’s Rainbow”, where he writes about why he loved watching cartoons as a kid and where he is retroactively taking a stand in opposition to the authoritative social “study” that was held on him along with other kids his age, on the detrimental effects on the growing minds of America at the hands of these scary violent Saturday morning cartoons. Hickey writes “…we kids knew whereof we spoke. We held symposia on ‘issues of representation’ at recess, and it turned out that everyone knew that if you ran over a cat with a lawn mower, the cat would be one bloody mess and probably die. Thus, when the much-beleaguered cartoon Tom was run over by a lawn mower and got only a shaved path up his back, we laughed.” Because, “What we wanted to see represented were chatty, impervious animals. What we wanted to see, however, was that wall of vibrant, moving color, so we could experience the momentary redemption of its ahistorical, extra-linguistic, sensual embrace - that instantaneous, ravishing intimation of paradise that confirmed our lives in the moment.” Eide’s work is dark and brutal for sure, but that darkness and brutality is not at the expense of light’s embrace, or compassion’s avowal, they are exactly intensified because of it.

            There are many artists who use the exaggerative qualities of cartoonish representation, and thank goodness although they are too numerous to list here, who share that common thread with Eide’s work, but one artist in particular brings a singular nuance in Edie’s work to the fore. Namely, the colossal eroticisms of Tom of Finland. Both Eide and “Tom” are gay artists who depict raunchy gay sex that constantly blurs the lines between pleasure and aggression, but that might be where the similarities end. Tom of Finland’s characters are filled, no pun intended, with self-confidence and romp effortlessly around in equal power plays of enjoyment and defilement. But Eide’s figures are more puckish and nervier. Even though they are caught in peak moments of ecstasy and elation, they nonetheless have that tinge of doubt. And I’ve noticed from looking at almost all of Eide’s work, or at least at a great deal of it, that his figure’s eyes are almost always in a state of mydriasis, in which the pupils constrict and get smaller. Our eyes do this in order to regulate and minimize the intensity of the surrounding light from entering our eyes. In a word, this peak of sublimity and freedom is almost too much to take. 

            Another contrast in the work is the way in which Eide plays with notions of the ‘cute’. Through the use of what Sianne Ngai, noted feminist scholar, calls “personification strategies”, ‘cute’ acts as a way to play with what it means to consume and be consumed and that this “aestheticization of powerlessness” troubles the categorical imperatives of something being either good or bad, protected or entirely defenseless. In a watercolor titled, Heart on Sleeve, the teen heartthrob magazine Bop is filled to the brim with shiny tween faces, flowers and a radiating sun, with one lone figure naked with, you guessed it, an erection shooting cum onto the magazine cover’s centerpiece, Jonathan Taylor Thomas. Cue the young gay childhood memories of jerking off to things not deemed as porn but were used that way anyway, in secretive worship. The cute and campy in Eide’s work, is what resists any safe resolution, instead, his slapstick of sex and gore engenders a position of feeling for others because it activates the potentiality for feeling altogether in our numbing cultural milieu.

            Moreover, even this idea of “feeling for others” is troubled in unexpected ways in Eide’s work. There came a moment, after looking at his work for so many hours on end that I started to see something so glaring, so explicit, that the fact that I had not recognized it earlier pointed to this additional complication in the work. The complication that all of Eide’s figures are actually in some degree or another in various states of sexual and gender nonconformity, and that there’s this sense that it’s no longer any “issue” for any of these figures, they’ve gotten past something we haven’t and that’s perhaps why I missed it before and how it was so revelatory when it became so deeply pronounced all of sudden. It threw my own blind spots and lack of vision back onto me. But then it still said ‘come with us anyways!’. 

Eide’s work will continue to be disagreeable to some and even repulsive to many. Comus, the Greek god of mirth and hilarity, where our words ‘comical’ and ‘comic’ are derived, was often found in a profound state of stupor, unable to handle all the revelry because it all became much too much. Peter culls from the seemingly impenetrable hoard of kitsch that is our American psycho-melodrama through its events, movies, tabloid scandals, and political atrocities via his memories and the Internet and gives you the option of coming along for the ride. Reducing him and his work to merely that of the trickster, or the provocateur is to miss the opportunity, as Dave Hickey put it, to experience “…a respite from language and history - a position from which to contemplate absence and death in the paradise of the moment…”.

My first encounter with Eide’s work was actually via one of his many AI character profiles on Instagram, called Tannis_ruitt, a repository for the hundreds of AI generated images he creates with prompts around an image of Thomas the Train Engine coming out of a tunnel. I was in grad school at the time, finishing up my thesis about my commute to and from grad school that involved taking a daily train. One morning I saw Instagram’s algorithm had prompted me with a friend suggestion from an ominous and playful profile, that I would much later find out belonged to Eide.

Making work with AI technologies is something Eide says he’s currently experimenting with, seeing where and how the technologies break down and go off the rails. But no matter his next moves in the studio, Eide’s work will continue to irk and delight because at the heart of Peter Eide’s endeavor is complicating the space between freedom’s ontological potential and our negation’s eidetic specter, a feeling we should tap into more often.