Cell 16 1995

Peter Halley made this small drawing, Cell 16, with graphite on paper. There's a clear sense of Halley figuring things out, that this is a process, as he builds a composition with rectangles and then infills with scribble. Look closely and you'll see that the graphite varies in tone, from silvery lines to dark dense smudges. The texture is dry, and the lines are wiry, giving the drawing a brittle quality. The scribbled areas are like frantic energy contained within very strict architectural space, and the geometric forms provide a structure for this seemingly random chaos. The central rectangle is especially dense, built up from endless nervous marks. It's almost like Halley is making a prison for his thoughts and feelings, and the "cell" becomes a metaphor for the mind itself, with all its tangled and contradictory impulses. I can't help but think of Cy Twombly's mark making or the architectonic precision of Agnes Martin, but pushed into a darker space. It's this push and pull between order and chaos that makes the drawing so compelling.