Sebastian Smee - Catalogue Introduction 

Looking at Peter Booth's work, I have never been sure whether the humiliation of being human is its base note, or rather, the humiliation of being less than human - of having thrown away whatever it was that once made us whole, innocent and good.

Perhaps the distinction - which has sustained whole edifices of religion is, after all, a false one: we are what we are, and what we are contains a perverse drive to be less than we are.

Like Philip Guston, another abstract painter turned figurative allegorist, Peter Booth has embraced aspects of the human condition that are awkward, lumbering and gauche in ways that have enlivened the painting of his time. There is nothing smoothly enigmatic or frictionless about the moods and atmospheres his work presents. Rather, his clunky, ungainly figures stick in the mind like lumps in the throat.

The figures in this show have broad faces and close-together eyes. None of them seems shrewd - only misbegotten, on the way to being broken, dumb. And yet the base note of humiliation is not the only note Booth hits. His best work exudes a great brotherly fund of compassion, a fellow feeling for the isolated, the untethered and the thick-headed. It also allows us to laugh.

As always in Booth's painting, it is the paint itself that does most of the hard work of conveying feeling. The rich, gummy impasto of his surfaces, with their effusions of gorgeous colour, imply a promise of beauty - or at least of an unearthly quiet - that eases the misery of his figures' predicaments.

Paint, like life, is promiscuous; it tells us several things, does several jobs, at once. What I like about Peter Booth's work is the way the paint gets mixed up in the message, which at first can seem unrelentingly gloomy, and complicates it, tells us new things, and colours it with new moods.