The physical qualities of the material are also brought out by the act of burning. Thus, the arbitrary alignment of the holes in a straight, vertical line eliminates the possibility of reading their arrangement as in some way representational or as obviously connected to Peeters’s state of mind at the time of their creation, while the use of a flame or other heat source allowed him to mark the surface without leaving a gestural trace of his hand. For the Nul artists, the artwork was a part of reality itself, rather than a surrogate for other objects or for the artist’s emotional state. The central tenets of Nul, which was formed in the year Burn Hole was made and lasted until 1965, were the total rejection of representation and expression in art. The very minimal aspects of Burn Hole’s production and its colourlessness have led to it being seen as a characteristic work of the Nul (Zero) group, of which Peeters was a founder member and key organiser.
COMPUTER BURN HOLE IN RETINA SERIES
While the uppermost hole has a dirty brown aura to it, the work is largely dominated by the contrast between the whiteness of the PVC sheeting and the blackness of the holes, with the soot providing some subtle shades of grey in between.īurn Hole is one of a series of works that Henk Peeters (1925–2013) began making in 1959 that he called ‘pyrographies’ (‘fire drawings’), which feature holes burned into canvas. Areas of soot at the top and bottom are suggestive of holes that might have been made, places where the artist was satisfied enough to merely scorch rather than puncture the surface. Wisps of smoke have left sooty deposits around all of the holes, linking them in a line and suggesting their connectedness.
The dominance of the central hole, both in scale and prominence compositionally, has possibly motivated the current title of the work, Burn Hole, in the singular. It is different in shape and character to the others, which are cleaner and squarer, indicating the use of different heat sources in the production of the work. The holes are aligned along the central vertical axis with the largest hole in the middle of the sheet.
In physical terms Burn Hole 1961 (Tate T13407 fig.1) is a sheet of white PVC, stretched over a wooden frame around one metre wide and eighty centimetres high, into which has been burned five holes of unequal proportions.
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