In conversation with Sarah Linford, professor of art history, John Cabot University, Rome.

Video created by: Aleksandra Nasobina and Leonardo Rovani

Sarah Linford: I’m sitting with Peter Flaccus in his Trastevere studio  in Rome. It's been likened to an alchemist's den. I often think of it as a kind of garden. It has these explosions of color that are always structured by natural and other phenomena. We're sitting in front of one of the most recent works that is characteristically both subtle in terms of its use of color, and deeply sensory in terms of its materiality. I wonder if you would say a few words about your encaustic process of the past 30 years 

Peter Flaccus: Encaustic means painting with colored wax, on a rigid surface. It's an ancient technique. Wax has many qualities and many advantages. It's extremely stable, that's why we have paintings that have lasted for 2000 years, from the deserts of Egypt, the Fayum portraits. Wax doesn't change with humidity or with oxygen. Everything that I do is based on this material. I started using it because I needed a material that I could manipulate after I had applied it. I had been painting with oil paint on wood, and that becomes very tough. I was scraping it and sanding it, and it was difficult. So I thought I would try something softer. That was my motivation, but as soon as I started it, I realized that encaustic gave me some unexpected qualities—the depth of it, the materiality of it, the way it builds up, the way it can be both transparent and very opaque.

There's just been a slow, long evolution. I pour it sometimes. This painting is an example. I wait for these somewhat accidental effects to take place, which I control to a limited extent. A lot of times I gouge into it and then fill those gouges with another color so I can get very crisp lines. I can scrape it because it has a certain thickness, not great thickness, but several millimeters. It's a substance. So unlike an oil painting, where you're looking at the last stroke of paint on it, with this, you're looking into it. You're looking into a slab of wax, very thin slab. So there's stuff inside it and as I scrape it, it's like scraping a piece of marble, so those veins will start to become visible. That makes encaustic profoundly different from painting with oil paint.

SL: I think the fact that you're comparing it to scraping away marble explains part of the luminosity of the paintings. Those different layers of wax are almost palimpsests of previous actions taken throughout your long and technical process. 

PF: It is a somewhat laborious process, but on the other hand, there are aspects of it that are very quick, because the hot wax is liquid, just like paint. So you can apply it with a brush, just like ordinary paint, but it solidifies in a couple seconds, half a minute. It becomes solid, but in that half a minute it might be moving, so a lot of those effects are the result of this moving color, which then is arrested all of a sudden in a certain formation. I do the smaller paintings quite fast. I'm just pouring things and waiting for unexpected, interesting accidents to happen. But they don't always cooperate, so sometimes I have to do five or six to get one good one.

SL: I wonder how long you've been working with encaustic. 

PF: While living in New York for twenty years, I used oil paint exclusively. In the early nineties I moved to Rome, and shortly afterward I started to use wax. Here, a somewhat paradoxical thing happened, because encaustic, which is a little bit cumbersome, slowed me way down. I had to set up my equipment, melt the wax, and think out the steps in advance. With oil paints, I had depended upon energetic and spontaneous gestures. It's so easy to use oil paint that you can just change a big painting from one thing to another in half a morning. The ease of that can make it difficult to know when the painting is finished. The encaustic process slowed me down and helped to clarify my thinking. Not only that, but the slowness meant that I always had a backlog of ideas waiting to be tried out, so I never ran out of ideas. 

SL: We're surrounded here with works that are from the seventies all the way to the most recent work from 2025, right behind us. It must give you an interesting perspective on your practice to see examples of 50 or 60 years of paintings. There are turning points, but I also see continuity, in that there is always an equilibrium between opposites, for example, between the spontaneity, the unknown, the happy accident, on the one hand, and your very deliberate structural systems on the other hand. Then, there is always color energy, and some suggestions of natural phenomena, of earth forms, or of mathematics or optics or even astronomy or cells or even vision and the eyeball or iris itself. One of the things that seems to connect this early work in oil with the most recent works is the way in which specific geometric shapes of a certain size, of a certain scale, of a certain disposition function as several different kinds of signs at the same time.

PF: This is a good example of what I was thinking then. I had a very strict set of rules about dimensions, proportions, color. In every phase of my work, I created rules for myself. That’s what we do as artists. This  painting is from 1977. It was part of the first group of works I showed professionally in New York, on 57th Street, in a very good gallery. I’m very happy to have it here now, and what makes me happy is that, even after many years, I see myself in it. Evidently I had recognized myself in this painting years ago, and from that point on, painting became a long evolution. Students often ask, “What should I do? How do I know what to do?” And all you can do is say: keep working. You just have to keep working until you see yourself. And when you see yourself, you're on the right track, your work is original, because there’s only one of you.

SL:Those little “windows” are a concentration of carefully calibrated color energy, symbols or almost mathematical signs, and are also elements of the strict geometric composition. That seems to put them in dialogue with your most recent work.

PF: Okay. Well, first of all, you hit on color, which has always been the motor, the energy, in my work. In that early painting, there's that dynamic between the concentration of a little element and the emptiness around it. There are some brushstrokes that just create a bit of texture around those elements, and that makes me think a little about Morandi, you know, with the painting around the little jars being as important as the little jars themselves. The dialectic between emptiness and concentration is something that continues into recent work. The formal structures actually make the paintings come alive. There need to be some competing forces in a painting to animate it and finally tell you it's finished.  

SL: Okay, Morandi makes more sense to me in terms too of thinking about the thickness of things.

I mean, in this one there's these two sort of small moments of a very slightly acid peachy orange on the left. That is picked up by something that peeks through over here in that sort of unformed line on the right. They play with each other. I mean, we're meant to connect them through color, but they speak to different thinking about form in a way that constantly plays with the different kinds of signs that you're making and that seemed less gestural than the sort of larger greenish white area in the center. So it seems to me that the palimpsest isn't just in terms of the time that it takes to really look at the work, or the time that it takes to make the work and to have the different layers and levels work with each other, and then just scrape away at it, but also with the different kinds of systems of thought that are operative at the same time, and that are always creating these tensions within each of them. So you give works their titles when you're finished, when they've come alive.

PF: Most artists give titles to their works afterwards. I can hardly think of an artist who thinks of a title first and then executes a painting accordingly. Many of the titles that I use are geographical.They may be places that have special meaning to me, or that I just visited, or suggest some kind of association with the forms of the painting. I give titles to paintings when they're about to leave the studio, and I have to make a list of works. So I need a title, not just “Untitled #7”.  I wouldn't assign too much meaning to it, it’s just a way of discouraging any kind of literal interpretation.

SL: To really see these paintings takes a long time. And I wonder if that's something that you would like to comment on.

PF: A big painting usually takes at least a month. But I work on lots of different things at once, and so it's a little hard to define exactly how long it takes to make one.  A painting that is rich deserves some attention and some time to look at it. I had a nice, big show at a museum in Rome called Palazzo Merulana, and the title I gave the show was The Painting Is a Place, because my idea is that it really is a place that you visit. If it’s constructed in an interesting way it invites you to enter it, to move around inside it, to explore every angle of it, and to spend time with it. It’s not a picture of a place—it’s actually the place itself, and you can lose yourself in it. 

SL: Is that why some of the works have been called Events? 

PF: That’s actually a slightly different issue. When I was first experimenting with encaustic—the hot liquid wax—I created some paintings where I had a field of one colour, and then poured another one, or two, or three colors concentrically. The wax was still hot and it would flow and expand and then fix in a matter of seconds. I call those “events” because they are actually things that happen in time. But they're quick. Then later on I started to incorporate that type of event in a bigger painting with a bigger and more ambitious space. You can actually sense the way the colors were expanding, so there's the illusion of movement, in space and in time. 

SL: I wonder also whether there is the idea of the painting being a place where something happens. The event is the slow unfolding of the optical, and the sensuous material qualities of the wax make it seem to be glowing. That forces us always to be really situated in the moment at which we are looking at the works. They are very active, and I think you can only get a sense of that when you see them in the flesh rather than in reproduction. They must be hard to photograph—they could be mistakenly read as graphic, as just flat. 

PF: But they're not sculptural. They really are flat, which is the basis of painting. The spatial tensions, the light, the sense of movement are illusionary.

SL: There's a series from the late eighties and nineties that incorporate  curlicues, loops, volutes. Some of those elements seem to be flirting with with the Baroque.

PF: Well, we're living in Italy!

SL: Is it fair to say that it's very much a dialogue between New York and Rome and Montana and a bunch of different places, or is that too reductive? 

PF:  My background as you say, is: Montana, the East Coast, New York, and then Rome. Montana is in there someplace, but I couldn’t say exactly how. In New York I lived in the middle of SoHo, and the seventies and eighties was a very stimulating time to be there. I had lots of friends who were artists, and I could walk out the door and, within five minutes, go up and down the gallery buildings in SoHo and see all the important shows. Another stimulating aspect of living in New York, by the way, is the presence of the great museums. Europeans who think Americans are bumpkins and don't know anything about art history or culture often don’t seem to realize what the Metropolitan Museum of Art is, or the Modern, or the Frick or the Whitney.

But I don't come out of a group of artists, and I don't come out of an intellectual system or a belief system, you know, except for this belief in paint. Actually, when I was living in New York and teaching at Bennington, I curated a show there called Belief in Paint, which had some very good artists, like, Eugene Leroy, have you ever heard of him? And John Walker, Katherine Porter, Kes Zapkus,and Louise Fishman, to name a few, were in the show. These are artists who are committed to paint. That's still a common attitude. There were artists in the past who had belief systems, important belief systems, that fed into their work. For example, we have the great recent discovery of Hilma af Klint! Now you have to rewrite the history of modern, abstract painting. She was motivated by spiritualist beliefs and even felt that she was directed on how to make her paintings, these beautiful paintings. Today we would probably label her schizophrenic or something. She wasn't at all, she was part of a very prevalent way of thinking in the late 19th century and early 20th century. I mean, my own grandmother was a member of the Theosophical Society, like Kandinsky himself. These people believed strongly in the supernatural. Like many composers, you know, think about Bruckner, deeply Christian, or Bach himself. Or Malevich, who believed in a new revolutionary life, but at the same time was connected with Russian folklore and icons. But, anyway, there was a wide belief in the avant-garde: we’re going to create a better world in modernism. 

Most of my contemporaries and I don't have those beliefs. We believe in something else. What are we motivated by? I'll tell you one thing that we're motivated by right now, and that is that society, the world around us, is radically conditioned by our devices, our digital reality. We painters object to this. These paintings are the opposite of virtual reality. By being very material, and requiring a view’s attention and presence, my painting is a kind of defense against the virtual world.