Geometry of Regression organizes its soft yellows and greens into broad sweeping bands that read as sky, terrain, and reflection, though none of these are declared. The transparent washes give the painting a layered spatial depth that reads as recession even as the forms resist resolution, and the pastel marks introduce a linear counterpoint, something measured and directional, within the color’s organic wandering.
Geometry of Regression organizes its soft yellows and greens into broad sweeping bands that read as sky, terrain, and reflection, though none of these are declared. The transparent washes give the painting a layered spatial depth that reads as recession even as the forms resist resolution, and the pastel marks introduce a linear counterpoint, something measured and directional, within the color’s organic wandering.
The title’s provocation is real: geometry implies structure, order, derivability; regression implies retreat or return. Together they suggest a composition moving away from its own ordering principle, which is exactly what the eye discovers. Arthur Dove spent his career at precisely this juncture, abstracting from natural observation into forms that retained the organic logic of their source while shedding its legibility. Petrov’s bands and pools of color operate in a similar register: nature as pattern, not as scene.
The pastel marks in the upper right, orange-red against the cooler greens and blues below, function as the painting’s highest-intensity accent, the formal role that a brighter chromatic event plays in many of Petrov’s oil works. The title’s geometry is perhaps most visible here: the marks are the most rule-governed element in the composition, straight-ish, directional, asserting axis within organic drift.
