Prison with Underground Conduit

'Then when I came to New York in 1980, the paramount issue in my work became the effort to come to terms with the alienation, the isolation, but also the stimulation engendered by this huge urban environment. [...] I’d seen Roll-a-Tex on suburban walls and was fascinated by it, and Day-Glo had always seemed very spooky and unnatural to me. [...] My first paintings of prisons were on raw canvas, with white Roll-a-Tex squares with bars in the middle. But the more I thought about alienation, the more I thought of telephones, televisions, electricity, things zipping in and out of isolated spaces, and so I felt I had to depict the support system that these isolated cells had. In the real world, they usually came from underground, so I put a second panel underneath the first to depict in section an underground conduit network feeding into the cells. It’s about above versus below-ground, visible versus hidden, and maybe even the conscious and subconscious.' PETER HALLEY