| The more you are different the more people will try to find the fil rouge within the work; the more you are the same the more it will be clear how everything is a variation rather than a repetition. With such a premise I approached Peter Halley’s show. The artist has been working with cells and geometrical structures since the very beginning. To demonstrate how not to be afraid of repetition, this show was preceded by a mini-retrospective of Halley’s work from 1982 to 1987 (when he was showing with the mythical artist-run space International with Monument) organized by his dealer Mary Boone at her golden age, corporate, Reagan-Trump style uptown gallery (indeed located in the Trump Tower). This time Halley is occupying the majestic space downtown. For the artist — who developed his work under the influence of French post-structuralism — these forms and colors (by the way changed over the years) are used as an alphabet, a very limited and therefore challenging alphabet that he uses to speak about modeling, perception and hyper-realism as a way to reach abstraction, etc. Furthermore he points out how painting has become an object, along the lines of the discourse started by Lucio Fontana and continued by Robert Ryman, among others. Quoting the show’s press release: “For each of the eight works in the exhibition, Halley configures one horizontal ‘Prison’ positioned above another slightly larger Prison that rests on a ground traversed by a single Conduit. Rising and bending at right angles are Conduits that bypass, segregate, or connect the two Prisons.” What a perfect way to represent technology-becometechnique. | 
