Love of life. Love of light. Opening unto sea and sky.

Peter Stilton above fashion is fighting against the fashionable smell of death into the world of art. He wants to bring joy to the Art “Amateur” and doesn’t want to use it as a way to question oneself on humanity’s sad condition.

“Chip” — I call Chip his favourite Chippendale chair, from the name of the so famous Chippendale English furniture designer of the eighteenth century, so familiar in American homes fond of antiques — follows him everywhere, as a faithful friend.

In Costa Rica, pre-columbian potteries had “a soul.”  The pieces of art were created with an empty space so as to let a small piece of terra cotta ring within the object. Thus, when one moved the piece of art you could hear “the soul” of the pottery.

In the same spirit, Chip has a soul and thus is the opposite of the still life from the classical painters. Chip is our guide within the poetic universe of its creator. Changing mood, it travels from one civilization to another and disguises itself in fine and various arrays.

In that manner, we discover it all dressed up in a crimson cloak, as a prelate in “Venetian poem” — splendid painting with gold insertions; or as a discreet couple listening soberly to “A Telemann Concert at the Williamsburg Palace,” within a magical and rethought world between sky and earth in “The chairs return from the beach and dream of starpools,” all of transparency on plexiglas while Mozart unfurls through the half open door “In through the looking-glass.”  It is often posing in bust in ochre tones in the domestic and pulpous atmosphere of the artist where we discover “the Stilton’s family room“, “The bedroom.”

A daily life magnified in warm and rich shades. For “Red chairs at the farm” it is in good company within charming bucolic surroundings, dreaming of a nearby ocean. Sometimes, it has the idea of changing nature because “Chairs are pretending to be flowers” and decide to organize “A garden party” with other “Chair-friends.”  Even when Peter Stilton shows Tampa, there is always the faithful Chip and you feel like traveling to Florida so as to discover the town, with its minarets reflecting between sky and sea.

Most of the time the painter catches up the poet and presents his paintings in lyrical text. Then the painter-poet couple mingles and invites us to dream in his fluid and incandescent intimate world. Stilton distillates happiness, a happiness without any pretension but which does not lack fervor and enthusiasm. It is a Florida ray of sun exploding into our stiff world.

Thanks Peter Stilton for this superb exhibition. I am sure that the Parisians will come and warm themselves with the glowing colors of your paintings.

Charles Tanguy, Critique d’Art, From the exhibition catalogue “Art et Communication” Paris, 1995