For the first time, the bechter kastowsky gallery is showing the works of Stefan Peters. Peters, who was born in Belgium and also lives and works there, focuses strongly on the question of painting in his work. The exhibition ‘tractatus’ presents three of his series, all of which take a specific look at the history of painting.
Taking a so-called cabinet furniture as his starting point, Stefan Peters has worked intensively with the technique of painting small formats. The individual panels, which were often decorated with paintings on copper, are now detached from the three-dimensional everyday object of the cabinet and become individual pictures in rows. The furniture as a support for thought has thus disappeared; what remains are the picturesque landscapes. The picture ground - in Peter's case made of wood - is divided into equally sized areas with the help of tape. He paints his landscapes on the wooden panel at random, not in a linear direction. It is a quick painting that reveals a wide variety of references to the history of painting in its individual components. Be it prints of a Rembrandt, abstractly expressive mountain massifs or romantic landscape impressions à la Caspar David Friedrich - each picture window seems to stand alone and yet as a whole they form an all-over and go beyond the boundaries of the picture. In addition to these Chronicles, works from his Diaphonous series will also be on display.Abstract brushstrokes are applied to plastic film. The foils, cut into circles after the painting process, are then placed on top of each other in layers of four to five, creating a kind of stage set. The painting becomes a landscape - green vegetation comes into the recognisable foreground. This illusion is also the theme of the series theatres of the mind. Elements of everyday life suddenly appear in the middle of a picturesque stage landscape: climbing holds, coloured light bulbs or even ladders - a surreal situation.
The exhibition shows the theme of painting in its purest form. Whether broad brushstrokes, light traces on foils or the connection between photorealistic elements in painterly backdrops - Stefan Peters explores and analyses the medium. An analysis that also forms the basis of the exhibition's title: Tractatus as the first major work of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. The modus mathematicus, which Wittgenstein uses for his theories of meaning and language, divides the entire work into precise sections - not unlike Stefan Peters' separations on the individual picture carriers. Structure, form, facts or even ‘the world (in the) totality of facts, not of things’, are thematised. The last section, and probably the most quoted sentence in Wittgenstein's entire work, is also intended to form the conclusion here: ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.’
Opening speech: Günther Oberhollenzer (Curator Landesgalerie Niederösterreich)
Related artist
-
Stefan Peters