OIL WAX AND GLAZEPETER "AIR GLOW" NUMBER 20 BY PETER BUREGA, October 2002 Santa Fe, New Mexico 50“ x H66“

Teaming with frenzied descriptions of energy abstracted, Peter Burega’s paintings relate a dense organic abyss. His own cosmology is presented in work that bears witness to a number of intriguingly balanced dualities: organic/linear, man-made/natural, order/chaos, structured/amorphous. Much like the work of the British romantic landscape painter J.M.W.Turner, landscape and nature serve as potent points of departure for Burega’s work. It is often the spaces where man meets the natural environment that captivate Burega, who actively photographs natural forms, such as water, bubbles, and waves and dilapidating man-made structures, like bridges, to work from when in the studio. The final imagery is a mingling of this documentation and Burega’s own physically exercised psychology. As a result, his working process at times mirrors the man/nature relationship—he describes it “…as a give and take [and] increasingly confrontational.”