An introverted child, Peters spent much of her childhood content with her own company, lost in her imagination and preferring the worlds she found inside a screen to real life. She spent hours drawing fantasy landscapes, watching Transformers cartoons, and playing video games, and her earliest sources of inspiration came from science fiction book illustrations, heavy metal album covers and the results of rudimentary coding on her ZX Spectrum. These visual languages stayed with her as creative influences until, at art school, she discovered the dynamic paintings of Krasner, Frankenthaler, Mitchell, Kelly and Newman. Signifiers of the cultural material that Peters consumed as a child has remained present in the paintings that she makes today, remixed with references to high art learned at art school and through her PhD studies. She creates imaginary, interior landscapes where she’s interested in how we navigate what is abstract and what is real, what is intuitive and what is made through logical thought, “By reconfiguring the things that I have consumed visually I make fantastical worlds where intuitive smears of paint co-exist with hard-edge geometry, and references to Modernist abstraction meet the aesthetics of screen culture.” (Charley Peters in conversation with The Foundry Gallery, 2023.) The paintings are a fine balance of image and surface - unquestionably physical experiences that unsettle the immediate familiarity of the digital aesthetic. When we look at the paintings over time, they begin to reveal layers of work hidden underneath the uppermost surface, traces of ideas.

Full Throttle, her new solo exhibition at The Foundry Gallery, London is an engaging installation of paintings and painted objects which reflect the graphically complex world in which we live, which Peters describes as a space “where we simultaneously see multiple ‘windows’ on computers, smartphones and digital tablets which display disparate images at once, each with their own temporal, spatial, and visual registers.” (Peters, C  (n.d.). // about» charley peters. [online] Available at: https://charleypeters.com/about/. [Accessed 21 May 2023].) Full Throttle developed from Peters’ interest in the 1999 PlayStation 2 game ‘Driver’, in which you play as a driver in a series of car chases. Inspired by films such as Bullitt, a 1968 film starring Steve McQueen, The Driver (1978) and The French Connection (1971), the multiple views within the game capture the car moving through virtual fictional cities that feel curiously familiar. The pixelation that appears at the periphery of the screen (jaggies), gives the impression of a shimmering texture as your car speeds through urban city streets. The game isn’t attempting to be a new reality, but like Peters’ work it is an abstract version of an imaginary world, a hyperreality.

In Full Throttle, alongside a suite of paintings on canvas are a number of painted objects - traffic cones and chain barriers - both of which appear as props to navigate and crash through in the game Driver to add drama and excitement. These painted objects create obstacles that we need to navigate to see the exhibition in the round. They also “acknowledge the sculptural potential of painting where most of what we experience is non-physical and seen on a screen.” (Murphy, B. (2019). Charley Peters in conversation with Remi Rough. [online] Delphian Gallery. Available at: https://delphiangallery.com/charley-peters-conversation/ [Accessed 21 May 2023].)

Hand painted vintage floppy discs and 3D prints of pixelated stars further reinforce the relationship between the analogue and digital in Peters’ work and the spatial potential of the painted surface, creating an interplay between flatness and sculptural form.

Behind the paintings on canvas on the gallery’s walls, Peters has made a series of site specific greyscale wall paintings of graphic symbols reminiscent of road markings, signage and car dashboard icons, which interact with the gallery’s layout. As well as being suggestive of the language of hard-edge abstraction, they act as a framing device to the canvases, creating another level of dynamism, “You can’t compete with the architecture of spaces but it eventually becomes part of the work…it’s like a collaboration.” (The Art Five. (2015). Post | The Art Five Contemporary Art Projects and Interviews. [online] Available at: http://www.theartfive.com/post/the-art-five-issue-23-with-artist-charley-peters) [Accessed 21 May 2023].)

Charley Peters’ work is characterised by dualities, positioned somewhere between representation and abstraction, and control and impulsivity. In Full Throttle, Peters has created an exhibition of exhilarating paintings and painted objects where she has taken the language of High Modernism and made it collide spectacularly with the aesthetics and pervasiveness of contemporary screen culture.