You Want It Darker

Peri Schwartz is known primarily for her lushly rendered still life paintings and prints; she infuses this traditional genre with a vitality, pushing the representational elements into the realm of abstraction. You Want it Darker is part of the Bottles and Jars series she began in 2010. In these works, Schwartz creates carefully constructed arrangements in her studio of bottles and jars of different sizes filled with liquids in various colors and tones. She adjusts the components until she finds the right balance between transparecy and opacity, color and non-color, and solid and void. Although she works from a three-dimensional arrangement, she flattens the forms so that they resemble the grid she uses to aid in her depiction of the scene. Despite the title, the bottles and jars are just a pretext for Schwartz to examine her true subject: that of the influence of natural and reflected light and the effect it has on the shimmering bottles and their contents. The squared shape of the bottles, each with flat black lids, create a kind of sameness so that they essentially disappear into an abstract pattern recalling early modernist grids and allow the various hues of the inks--in this case, exclusively grey or black--to dominate the composition.