In one of his “Notes” from 1986, Gerhard Richter writes, “Of course my landscapes are not only beautiful or nostalgic, with a Romantic or classical suggestion of lost Paradises, but above all ‘untruthful’ […] and by untruthful I mean the glorifying way we look at Nature [which] in all its forms is always against us, because it knows no pity, no sympathy, because it knows nothing and is absolutely mindless.”

In this complex, and not at all necessarily contradictory, vein, comes Peter Hoffer’s marvellous exhibit “Prose” at Nicholas Metivier Gallery. Hoffer paints trees, mostly of the palm variety. His approach is, in a sense, modernist, or structuralist: Hoffer does verisimilitude well, but always wants to remind us that we are looking at a painting (and, it is safe to assume, always wants to feel the vigour of making one). And so he adds stains, drips and other traces of construction, and bisects his works into two panels, as if they’ve been printed across the seam in a book. He also finishes off the works with so many layers of resin they appear to be cased in glass.

All this is, to be sure, to provide a stunningly mute spectacle as well as a provocatively chatty one: some paintings are named after philosophers (Diderot, Sartre), and some after Greek gods (Dionysus, Jupiter), emphasizing his subjects’ endless discursive provocations as well as their mighty, prelinguistic mysticism. One work, Close, should remind viewers of recent media images of hurricane Ike tearing through Cuba and Haiti, but it is beautifully sinuous and placid as a painting. Art is indeed nature’s most constructive way of devouring itself.

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