Artists » Peter Alexander Por

Papa Innocente III, 2011, acrylic on canvas 42 x 42 octagonal

b 1945

Toronto based artist Peter Alexander Por’s work originates from “An inner necessity to create”. His eclectic output is a highly personal response to our complex world, a meditation on live and at the same time a cathartic experience. Through his art-making, a language between his “soul” and Eros manifests itself! In his three dimensional pieces, the unlikely is juxtaposed with the improbable by a shifting of the perspective from the original common, often banal and every day object to a reconfiguration of the elements into a new and revised context. Both his paintings and sculptures can generally be categorized as “hyper personal”. The artist paints and creates three dimensional works which reflect his inner life and inner process...dreams, photographs, world events, personal and family issues are all inspirational sources of his craft. The works are straddling the boundaries of surrealism, dada and representational. He uses sketchbooks for recording ideas as they present themselves and for delineating concepts. The work is very often spontaneously carried out and occasionally he switches to a carefully planned and laboured over method, reconfiguring repeatedly before he’s satisfied. There is no fixed pattern in his approach. Religion, social issues, sexuality, politics, outrage, love, disbelief, reverence and passion regularly manifest as themes from the artist’s psyche, materializing in the physical realm. Artist Peter Alexander Por is currently focused on sculpture and printmaking and his eclectic outbursts have been exhibited since 1971. The creative blue eyed devil has a long teaching history in a variety of artistic disciplines including painting, collage, sculpture, drawing and printmaking. He holds degrees in Architecture and Studio Fine Arts (in Sculpture) from the University of Illinois, Chicago and York University, Toronto. Collections in Germany, France, the United States and Canada display the artist’s aesthetic vision.

Private Collections

Persona Non Grata - the Veil of History consist of 30 canvases and 4 sculptures. Here is a critique fragment by Judy Stoffman and Ray Ellenwood about Peter A. Por's work cited from the exhibition catalogue.

"He [P.A. Por] introduced me to the men in the paintings, a roll call of the greatest villains and mass murderers of the 20th Century. “This one is King Leopold of Belgium” he said of a big bearded figure. Leopold II was responsible for the death of about 15 million inhabitants of the Belgian Congo.
Other members of this blood stained brotherhood were Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia (230,000) killed, Mao Tse Tung (45 million killed), Pol Pot of Cambodia (3 million of his countrymen dead), Tojo Hideki of Japan (responsible for the death of about 20 million in the Asia Pacific region in World War II), Saddam Hussein (2 million). And there were still others.
It is not easy to look at these pictures. The viewer’s instinct is to turn away. [...] Why would an artist waste his talent and attention on ignoble and depraved figures?
Peter Alexander Por has lived through dark times. Born before the end of World War II in Budapest, when Hitler and Stalin were still ripping up Europe, he is a contemporary of many of his subjects. They have shadowed his life. Brought up as a Catholic, he is acutely sensitive to the great struggle between good and evil in the world. The existence of cruelty and murder offends him personally and he cannot forget it. It is as though he lacks the protective skin that most people have developed to be able to function. [...] In his new work he is still searching for a visual language to describe his moral and political preoccupations. He is asking us to look closely at these men and acknowledge what human nature is capable of. And it is not a pretty sight."

---Judy Stoffman
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(Judy Stoffman worked nearly two decades at the Toronto Star, writing about books and art. Before that, she was an editor for the Globe & Mail's Report on Business and for Canadian Living Magazine, and a producer on CBC-Radio's "As It Happens." With her husband Daniel Stoffman, she translated "In the Name of the Working Class," the memoirs of Sandor Kopacsi, police chief of Budapest during the Hungarian uprising of 1956. The book was published in English in the U.S., Britain and Canada in 1986.)



"[...]Consider Pope Innocent The Third. Not content to wield immense power in Europe, he grew impatient with a group of dissidents (the Cathars, whom he saw as heretics) living in the area of Languedoc around Toulouse, Albi, Carcassonne in what is now France. These people had the effrontery not only to question doctrine, but to condemn luxury and corruption in the church. This was in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. Innocent encouraged King Louis IX to mount the Albigensian crusades, essentially sending what is now the north of France against the south, cousin against cousin, in the first and only crusade of the Catholic church against Christians. The armies enforcing the Pope's point of view enjoyed his absolution and were given the right to claim the property of those they destroyed. Thousands of men, women and children were killed. The entire town of BĂ©ziers was wiped out.
Dante knew what such holy men deserve. And what about that devil who shook the hand of Romeo Dallaire, or the perpetrators of genocide in what was Yugoslavia, or in Armenia, or Indonesia? It's not always easy to get a clear picture of them. One man's brutal dictator may be another's Uncle Joe, even a hero or protector. According to the Globe and Mail of December 18, Hitler has only now been struck from the honour roll of the citizens of Dulmen in North Rhine-Westphalia, seventy years after orchestrating some of the defining horrors of the twentieth century. That may be why Peter's monsters remain veiled, sketchy, missing colour and detail, with ambiguous lines somehow squaring them off in what could be a hopeless wish to define or confine them.
But one thing is sure: these personae are more than just non grata.[...]"

---Ray Ellenwood
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(Ray Ellenwood is a specialist in Surrealism and related avant-garde movements, retired from York University in 2005, whose recent publications include a collaboration with Roald Nasgaard on the catalogue for the exhibition The Automatiste Revolution, Montréal: 1941-1960, shown at the Varley Art Gallery in Markham and the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo, 2009 - 2010.)




SELECTED EXHIBITIONS

Here is the list of Peter A. Por's previous exhibitions:

2006 "The Last Supper" Installation, Toronto
2006 "Meeting the Shadow" Installation, Toronto
2005 "Easy Rider" Installation, Toronto
2002 Studio Por - Solo Sculpture & Painting Exhibit, Toronto
1999 The Third Eklektik, Le Commensal, Toronto - Solo Painting Exhibit
1997 The Poor Alex Theatre, Group Painting Exhibit, Toronto
1997 Toronto Outdoor Art Exbition, Recent Paintings
1995 National Ballet of Canada Benefit, Group Painting Exhibit
1995 4th Gear, Toronto; Group Sculpture Exhibit
1995 Eklektikos No 2, IDA Gallery, Solo Sculpture and Painting Exhibit, Toronto
1994 York University, Student Centre Gallery, Group Sculpture Exhibit, Toronto
1993 Eklektikos, Eleanor Winters Gallery, Solo Sculpture and Painting Exhibit, Toronto
1993 Art by Architects, O'Keefe Centre, Toronto; Group Exhibit
1993 Past...Present...Future, OAA, Solo Sculpture & Painting Exhibit
1992 North York Seniors Centre, Solo Exhibition of Sculpture and Painting
1992 Gallery 306, Toronto - Juried Group Sculpture Exhibit
1975 Art in Craft, London Art Gallery - Juried Sculpture Exhibition
1971 Make, Ontario Science Centre - Exhibition of Juried Sculpture