Peter Flaccus is an American painter living and working in Rome since 1993. Soon after his move to Italy, he began experimenting with encaustic, which has remained his preferred medium for more than thirty years. Encaustic means painting with colored beeswax. In this demanding medium he has invented a singular repertory of techniques and formal structures. His work has a strongly physical, material presence, with a palette that ranges from black and white through tenuous grays to combinations of intense color. His paintings, both small and large, contain geometric motifs, rhythms, layers and counterpoints, and allusions to natural forms and processes from the microscopic to cosmic scale.
The Painting is a Place was the title he gave to an important museum exhibition held in Rome. The title meant that a painting is not a picture of a place, but is the place itself, a place that invites a viewer to enter it leisurely and actively explore its contents.
Born (1947) in Missoula, Montana, Peter Flaccus grew up experienced in the forests, mountain trails, trout streams and ski runs of the mountain West. A visit to the contemporary art section of the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair ignited an interest that led to his art studies at Amherst College. A summer at Skowhegan, and an MFA from Indiana University preceded a move to New York City, where he lived and worked in a Soho loft for twenty years. In New York he had numerous shows, predominantly at the Zabriskie Gallery and the Monique Knowlton Gallery. He was awarded residencies at Yaddo and at the MacDowell Colony, and received grants from the N. Y. Foundation on the Arts. In 1989 he curated an exhibition at Bennington College called “Belief in Paint.”
Since his first New York exhibition at the Zabriskie Gallery in 1977, his long list of solo exhibitions in the U.S., France, Italy and Switzerland include, recently: Maja Arte Contemporanea, Rome (2025, 2022, 2019); Palazzo Merulana, Rome (2023); Gallerie Riunite, Intragallery, Napoli (2018); James Barron Art at “Art Miami”(2017); Art51, Lugano (2017); Palazzo Cerio/Intragallery, Capri (2015); Intragallery, Napoli (2014/15); Otto Gallery, Bologna (2014); Galleria “La Nube di Oort”, Rome (2014); Galleria Monty&Company, Roma (2014); Galerie L’Agart, Amilly, France (2009); Stiftung Muellerhaus, Lenzburg (2004); Ninni Esposito Arte Contemporanea, Bari (2009, 2004, 2002, 2000); La Casa delle Letterature di Roma (2009); Il Frantoio di Capalbio, Capalbio (2007); Galleria A.A.M., Rome (2004); Zabriskie Gallery, New York; Teppichfabrik Malans (2002); Galleria Marcello Rumma, Rome (1999); Monique Knowlton Gallery, New York; Galleria della Associazione Culturale Italo-Francese, Bologna (1997).
Peter Flaccus is Emeritus Professor of art at John Cabot University, Rome. He has also taught at many other institutions, including Princeton University, Bennington College, Cooper Union, Washington University, State University of New York at Purchase, Illinois State University, Colorado State University, the University of Washington, and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine.
2022 Exhibition, The Flat Earth. Maja Arte Contemporanea
“My thinking is in the physical methods I use and in the experiments I invent, not in dreaming up images. I have become familiar with the effects of the wax textures, of transparency, opacity, linear incisions, and the effects that happen when liquid colors mix and solidify. My work would be impossible in any other medium. Sometimes I employ mechanisms that create forms accidentally, without my knowing in advance the precise outcome. When I paint I am waiting to see the moment when the work gives me a new experience, and when it does I know that it is alive and stands on its own two feet. I try to put together interesting relationships, not just images that people glance at for a few seconds. The formal structures guide the eye, and looking takes some time. I hope viewers start to see things in my work that are not just on the surface, things that are not in everyday life, not in nature, nor in anyone else’s art.”
