Exhibition | 14 – 26 February 2026 | Cape Town
Peter Eastman’s painting explores the edge between invisibility and revelation. The Beira Paintings, inspired by Scottish landscapes, are dark, layered canvases where light is not just a pictorial element but a powerful, dramatic force that brings form out from the depths. There is no narrative, no explanatory composition; instead, the images seem to emerge from the darkness that comes before vision. The canvases, appearing monochrome, reveal tiny changes in light intensity over time. Natural elements are always present—trunks, branches, water reflections, but they escape clear definition. The forest, in Eastman’s works, is a living, independent visual entity, untamed by the gaze.
Eastman’s work isn’t traditional landscape painting. It’s a contemplation on the act of seeing itself. In a state of slow, perceptually active immersion, the images present themselves to the observer as fleeting apparitions, almost caught between memory and intuition. Vision in the Beira Paintings is never given but suspended: the eye moves within the density of the surface seeking a point of stability that keeps shifting. Then the light.
There is something profoundly temporal in this painting. The works capture specific atmospheric and luminous conditions, never to be repeated. Each canvas is a fragment of a contact, the result of a journey: between the painter’s body, the space of the forest, and the ineffable time of perception. Light acts as a subject and as a threshold, suspended between revealing and concealing.
Eastman works on the edge of visibility. His images don’t impose themselves, don’t present themselves, but reveal themselves over time, asking the viewer for a different approach: not quick visual consumption, but perceptive attention, the willingness to lose oneself in the space of ambiguity. In this sense, the Beira Paintings are slow, intimate, and radical works—not because they depict something specific, but because they remind us that seeing is already an interpretative, mobile, unstable act. Like the forest, Eastman’s painting also remains in constant transformation.
Peter Eastman
Peter Eastman is a South African artist whose practice is rooted in the subtle tensions between visibility and disappearance. Working primarily with surfaces that shift according to light and perspective, Eastman creates paintings that are both materially rich and conceptually elusive. His signature technique, often involving the incising, scraping, and layering of enamel, graphite, resin, or oil on aluminum, produces works that appear and disappear with the viewer’s movement, activating a sensory experience that unfolds over time.
Trained at the Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town, Eastman began his professional journey in London as a restorer of antiquities. This early encounter with patina, surface history, and the tactile memory of objects continues to inform his visual language. His approach to painting is both physical and reflective, translating an interest in light, environment, and perception into meditative, immersive landscapes. His subjects often emerge from natural environments, river valleys, dense vegetation, glinting water surfaces, filtered through memory and distilled into quiet, haunting images. In his ongoing body of work focused on deep, forested ravines in the Eastern Cape, Eastman explores the psychological resonance of place, engaging with nature as both motif and metaphor.
Eastman’s work has been widely exhibited in South Africa and internationally. In a landmark exhibition curated by Yacouba Konaté, he presented a series of black portraits at Primo Marella Gallery in Milan, Italy. The project offered a powerful reflection on presence and erasure, and introduced his work to a broader European audience. He was also among a select group of artists commissioned to produce official artworks for the FIFA World Cup in South Africa, with his contribution later auctioned by Phillips de Pury in New York.His paintings are held in numerous public and private collections worldwide, and have drawn the attention of collectors and curators such as Primo Marella, who has been a consistent advocate of his work.
Peter Eastman will present his first solo exhibition in Germany with Suburbia Contemporary in May 2025, at the gallery’s Leipzig space.
