Chad Petersen is an Oklahoma-born painter who moved to the techni-color blunderland of Los Angeles, California to study art and painting at Otis College of Art and Design.'  He found his earliest influences back in the midwestern plains of Oklahoma, surrounded by endless horizons, and his mother’s hobby store landscape paintings.'  His mother’s paintings were influenced by mid 19^th century American Landscape Painting, which often sought to inspire the viewer, and provoke enthusiasm and hype around westward expansion into the new frontier of the American wild west.'  They were also infused with the tendencies of Luminism, which sought to emphasize the depiction of light, detail, and an overall dreamy-poetic atmosphere, offering an escape from ordinary life, and the potential for elevation of the spirit.'  It was out of this past aesthetic experience, combined with a new cultural environment in the fast paced media factory, and flashy style of sunny southern California, Petersen’s new work was born.' ' 

With titles referencing his favorite Japanese fiction writer, Haruki Murakami, and compositions adapted from internet images of admired paintings from recent art history, Petersen makes horizontal sprayed acrylic stripe paintings that illustrate his own image of a new kind of abstract Luminism. Amongst other popular culture phenomena, they owe inspiration to an over-abundance of visual media constantly streaming around us on the ubiquitous television, computer, or personal media screen.'  They offer the viewer fictitious luminous sites in which to contemplate the virtues of or downfalls of all of this dizzying electronic imagery.'  His horizontal extrusions also point out a defiance toward the ideas that painting can aid in transcendence, sometimes promoted by admired color-field painters of the 1950’s and 60’s.'  Petersen’s ideas are often sketched on a computer, with the aid of digital photo and illustration software, and the colors are usually imitated.'  They are sprayed onto the surface with the aid of a rig on tracks created by the artist to steady his hand as he glides down the length of the acrylic polymer coated panel.'  The process is part man, part machine, and for the most part, the artist and art never really come in contact with each other.'  This production process reads as cold and mechanical as it actually is. At first look, one feels drawn in, and seduced by the jubilant candy colors and lazy horizontal compositions.'  But as the gaze continues, and the viewer approaches the work,'  optical tension often creates eyestrain and fatigue, and forces the viewer to look away.

It is this dichotomy of pleasure and pain, beauty and repulsiveness that Petersen seeks to point out as his own interpretation of pictorialism in a contemporary image-based culture of visual over-consumption.