Pitin's Peekskill Landing

What if you could marry Francis Bacon’s work to that of Edward Hopper?

It might look something like the haunting mixed-media canvases of Daniel Pitin, whose exhibit “Garrison Landing” is at the Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art in Peekskill through April 17. Like Hopper, Pitin has a great, theatrical sense of place. His “Psycho House” (2010), an oil, acrylic and paper on canvas, is reminiscent not only of the solitary structures in Hopper’s work but the houses that dominate George Stevens’ “Giant” and Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho.” There’s also Hopper’s inimitable play of light on the side of buildings, as in Pitin’s “Lost House.”

But Pitin’s works also make use of the kind of melting, distorted figures you find in Bacon’s paintings, as in “Bird House,” in which floating figures are suspended in backbends amid a deteriorating interior.

Daniel Pitin's "Bird House"

Of course, Pitin’s work may have nothing to do with these artistic influences. Or it may have been inspired by others: There’s a hint here of Robert Rauschenberg’s collage paintings and Anselm Kiefer’s monumental canvases. A Czech-born painter, Pitin created these works while he was artist-in-residence at the center for three months last year. So while we might assume a certain American or Western influence in the paintings – Garrison Landing is a real place in Garrison and home of the Garrison Art Center-- there’s no question that Pitin also brings to his dreamscapes his native Prague, where he studied classical painting and conceptual media at the Prague Academy of Fine Arts (1994-2001).

During his studies there, he twice received the prize for the best work of the year, was the recipient of the Henkel Art Award for artists from Central and Eastern Europe in 2004 and won the Mattoni Prize for the best new artist’s work at the Prague Biennale in 2007. He’s had solo shows at the Mihai Nicodim Gallery in Los Angeles and the Charim Gallery in Vienna.

Now he’s here. Let’s hope we see more of him.

“Garrison Landing” coincides with the center’s big show “After the Fall” (through July),  which spotlights emerging contemporary artists from Eastern and Central Europe, who were educated there in the period between communism and democracy. The works in this show include the paintings “Tito’s Cadillac” (2010) by Zsolt Bodoni and “Black Sea Tan” (2009) by Marius Bercea and the photograph “Behaelter” by Matija Brumen.