Unsworth's paintings seem to deal with an event about to happen; something just outside the picture frame. Sinister mise-en-scènes, they are painted in a disquietingly simple, pleasantly innocuous style. This is the secret of their success. Unsworth entices his viewers into each picture with a promise of innocence, only to hit them with a more disquieting meaning. His world is a world within a world. Looking into one of these paintings - with their expanses of flat colour and intriguing, enigmatic narrative - can seem at times like standing at the very edge of infinity.
Article from ‘The Week' 16 May 1998
The quality of Englishness is what strikes one first about Peter Unsworth's paintings: dreamlike happenings which inhabit the borderlands of memory, between sleeping and waking, of the actual and the imagined. But to call them narrative pictures or literary expositions in colour would be inappropriate since they are never explicit; figures, anonymous yet unnervingly recognizable, are frozen in some rarified moment of experience, their attitudes hinting at some imminent dynamic that may or may not be revealed. Unsworth attempts to give visual form to essences about people and places - more readily sensed or felt than actually seen. They are archaeologies of time and place. At the centre of his paintings there is a sense of the paranormal, threatening - and only tenuously placated by the rituals they call up and the order they instil.
Article by Paul Richie, Novelist, 1994
Unsworth's paintings suggest that he is in direct touch with a numinous and timeless realm, by some mysterious affinity he has with eternal moments and silences. Evocations of light appear in his paintings, presences which come alive in the most unexpected places in his scenes, as if light had erupted through the membrane dividing the spiritual from the physical. - Indeed, the physical is betrayed as a mere sham. - He captures the moments when reality is pierced by much deeper truths, as if those truths could no longer be suppressed but must burst through, must proclaim themselves amidst his still figures who drift in a dreaming state, - who stroll or gaze, rapt in contemplation of what is beyond. As one of his keenest collectors, the actor John Hurt, has said of what it is like to live with an Unsworth painting: "Peter Unsworth makes a room become more than a room, he transforms it into a Universe." And Peter Unsworth's Universe is one which mesmerises us with its simplicity, which speaks to us with its silence, which betokens the unutterable even as it raises a finger to its lips. With utmost calmness, the people in Unsworth's paintings experience the sublime in the midst of normalcy.
Robert Temple