Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs. We have become so accustomed to venerating works that shout their importance at us that we sometimes forget to look at what is right under our noses. Hilary Pecis, this extraordinary observer of the ordinary, has transformed domestic spaces and Californian landscapes into visual feasts that awaken our senses numbed by daily monotony.
In her paintings with saturated colors, where perspectives joyfully clash, Pecis reveals a fundamental truth: our immediate environment is full of beauty if we take the time to pay attention to it. This Los Angeles artist captures suspended moments with a precision that is never sterile, a vivacity that is never showy.
Her still lifes are portraits without faces. The books stacked on a coffee table, the vases overflowing with flowers, the geometric patterns of upholstery fabrics, all these elements tell the story of their absent owners. As Virginia Woolf wrote in “A Room of One’s Own”, “I believe that paintings and books are like those deep salt caves that miners explore under the sea” [1]. These salt caves, Pecis explores them with insatiable curiosity, transforming each object into a clue, each arrangement into a character.
Take her libraries painted with almost obsessive meticulousness. The names that appear there, Van Gogh, Matisse, William Blake, Eva Hesse, form an autobiographical frieze, a personal pantheon that anchors her art in a lineage while affirming its singularity. These references are not pretentious winks, but intimate confessions. What a wonderful way to make a self-portrait without ever showing oneself!
The Fauvist influence is undeniable in her exuberant palette. Carmine reds dialogue with electric blues, lemon yellows dance with sage greens. This chromatic explosion is never gratuitous; it translates an emotional intensity that mere representation could not communicate. Like André Derain who said that “colors were for me sticks of dynamite” [2], Pecis uses her palette to explode our habitual perceptions.
Her way of treating space is a delicious puzzle for our gaze accustomed to classical perspectives. Objects sometimes seem to float in an environment where gravity has been temporarily suspended. Euclidean rules are joyfully flouted, not out of technical ignorance but out of conscious aesthetic choice. This approach recalls that of Matisse who affirmed: “Exactitude is not truth” [3]. Pecis’s truth resides in the subjective experience of space, in those moments when our perception frees itself from physical constraints to embrace the totality of a scene.
Her urban landscapes of Los Angeles capture the very essence of this contradictory city. In “Sharon Flowers”, a florist’s facade becomes the pretext for a style exercise where the typography of the signs rubs shoulders with the organic forms of the flowers. The Californian light, this so particular light that has attracted so many artists to the American west, bathes her compositions in an almost supernatural clarity. One thinks of David Hockney and his love for this luminous quality, but where Hockney often sought the spectacular, Pecis prefers the intimate, the neglected, those street corners that we cross without seeing them.
The phenomenological philosopher Gaston Bachelard wrote in “The Poetics of Space” that “the house is our corner of the world. It is our first universe” [4]. Pecis’s work is a passionate exploration of these first universes, of these spaces that shape our perception and our relationship to the world. When she paints the interior of a house, each object seems charged with a significance that goes beyond its simple utilitarian function. A sofa is no longer just a piece of furniture, but the silent witness to conversations, readings, naps, all those moments that make up the invisible fabric of our lives.
Superficial critics might dismiss her work as simply “decorative”, a term often used to diminish women’s art. What a monumental error! Pecis is part of a pictorial tradition that dates back to the Dutch still lifes of the 17th century, those works that transformed everyday objects into meditations on temporality, materiality, and human desire. But she updates this tradition with a contemporary sensibility, aware of the visual overload that characterizes our era.
The absence of human figures in her paintings is not a lack but a deliberate choice. As she herself explains: “I think spaces can be as personal as a face portrait” [5]. This approach echoes Roland Barthes’ thought (without however falling into his semiological trap) on the way objects constitute a system of signs that communicates as much as words or facial expressions.
The visual rhythm of her compositions is often compared to that of Alex Katz, with his large flat colors and defined contours. But where Katz seeks a certain coldness, Pecis embraces warmth, imperfection, those little quirks that make a space alive. Her brushstrokes, which she herself describes as “marks of an unconfident painter” [6], create a texture that invites touch as much as sight.
Pecis does not hesitate to represent manufactured objects bearing identifiable brands, books, consumer products, thus transforming these commercial signifiers into pictorial elements. In doing so, she sheds light on the way our domestic environment is imprinted with these external signs, how our intimacy is always in dialogue with the social and economic world that surrounds us.
Her artistic practice is also a reflection on time. In an era where everything accelerates, where the digital image reigns supreme, Pecis chooses the meticulous slowness of acrylic painting. Each painting is the result of hours of observation and execution, an act of resistance against the immediacy that characterizes our contemporary relationship to images. As the philosopher Byung-Chul Han observes in his essay “The Scent of Time”, “contemplative life presupposes the ability not to react immediately to stimuli” [7].
The life of a long-distance runner that she leads in parallel with her artistic practice is not unrelated to her painting. In both cases, it is a regular practice, a physical engagement with the world, a form of active meditation. She often takes photos during her morning runs, capturing those fleeting moments when the light transforms an ordinary landscape into an extraordinary vision. This collection of images then becomes the raw material of her creations.
The apparent humility of her subjects hides a considerable artistic ambition. Pecis demonstrates that it is not necessary to tackle the great subjects traditionally considered “noble” to create significant art. A bowl of oranges on a striped table can contain as much truth as a mythological or historical scene. In this, she continues the path traced by artists like Pierre Bonnard or Édouard Vuillard, who elevated domestic scenes to the rank of great art.
Pecis’s relationship with Los Angeles is fundamental. This city often decried for its superficiality becomes under her brush a paradise of colors and textures. “Life in LA seems a bit slower and brighter, and I feel endless inspiration”, she confides [8]. This particular light, this unique atmospheric quality deeply influences her palette and her perception of spaces. Without falling into the cliché of the Californian paradise, she captures this tension between natural and artificial that characterizes the urban landscape of Los Angeles.
If the Fauvist movement constitutes a major influence for Pecis, it is perhaps with the artists of the Pattern and Decoration movement of the 1970s that she shares the most affinities. This group, mainly composed of women, sought to rehabilitate forms of expression traditionally associated with feminine crafts and decorative arts. Like them, Pecis embraces withoutcomplex the visual pleasure, the richness of patterns, the sensuality of textures.
Her creative process begins with photographs taken with her phone. From these images, she quickly sketches the composition on the canvas, then works in successive layers, adding details and colors without ever falling into slavish mimicry. This approach allows her to maintain a freshness, a spontaneity that animates her paintings. As she explains: “I take a lot of liberties with what is depicted in the original image, as well as with the colors used and amplified” [9].
What really distinguishes Hilary Pecis is that she makes us rediscover the beauty of the everyday. In a world obsessed with the spectacular, the extraordinary, she reminds us that true magic often hides in the most banal corners of our lives. Her paintings act as perception amplifiers, inviting us to look at our own environment with new eyes, to rediscover the brilliance of a vase of flowers illuminated by the morning sun or the complex geometry of a bookshelf filled with books.
Her recent evolution towards larger formats testifies to a growing confidence. These large canvases allow the viewer to truly “enter” the represented space, to be enveloped by these shimmering interiors. As she says: “I really like to be able to truly enter a painting as a viewer, and with the larger canvases, I feel like I can enter the space in a way that was not possible with the smaller works” [10].
Despite the purists who would like to confine contemporary painting to abstraction or the conceptual, Pecis proves that figuration still has a lot to tell us. Her work does not merely represent the world, it transfigures it, revealing the hidden poetry in each object, each space. She practices what the poet Wallace Stevens called “a rage for order”, this obsessive attempt to give form and meaning to the chaos of the real.
So, you bunch of snobs, the next time you pass by a painting by Hilary Pecis, stop. Take the time to get lost in these familiar yet strange spaces, in these compositions that defy logic while celebrating the palpable, the tangible. Perhaps you will discover, like me, an invitation to slow down, to truly look at what surrounds you. And is that not one of the essential functions of art, teaching us to see?
- Woolf, Virginia, “A Room of One’s Own”, Éditions 10/18, 1992.
- Derain, André, cited in “Matisse and Derain: 1905, The Year of Fauvism”, Flammarion, 2005.
- Matisse, Henri, “Écrits et propos sur l’art”, Hermann, 1972.
- Bachelard, Gaston, “The Poetics of Space”, Presses Universitaires de France, 1957.
- Vitello, Gwynned. Pecis, Hilary, interview in Juxtapoz Magazine, spring 2021.
- Ibid.
- Han, Byung-Chul, “The Scent of Time”, Circé, 2016.
- Vitello, Gwynned. Pecis, Hilary, interview in Juxtapoz Magazine, spring 2021.
- Ibid.
- Pecis, Hilary, interview with Nancy Gamboa, Cultured Magazine, June 23, 2021.
