Halley's Comet Returns in Day-Glo Fashion After 40 Years

Peter Halley's paintings from the 1980s, with their hermetic chambers tethered to the outside world by data lines, have a premonitory quality, anticipating the total triumph of the digital revolution. Halley's cool, rigorous conceptualism has historically been better received in Europe. His dedication to the conceptual bend of his practice can feel extreme, at once overly cerebral and naïve. Halley's paintings are a kind of self-portraiture: Holed up in his apartment and reading French post-structuralists like Jean Baudrillard and Michel Foucault, Halley created works that memorialized his melancholy, a square trapped in a square.