Peter Vahlefeld
dislocates these items from their known context and injects them with new value
Peter Vahlefeld is interested in thinking of paintings not so much as artworks in themselves, but merely as tools or means for a process. In this case the work does not concern itself with subject matter or content; what it aspires to before anything else is to be an object. This object is, in fact, Painting. Expanding the notion of painting onto images, the artwork features swift and expressive brushstrokes rendered upon overpainted pigment prints. This procedure is not an attempt to disrespect images and that which they represent; rather it is a bid to alleviate the stoic nature of images from their context as representations of something existing in the media flow and to recuperate them as pure objects re-indexed by random gestures rather than by rigid interpretations. Better to paint out than to deal with it.
Vahlefeld’s brand of painting is chaotic, beautiful, and volatile, marked by abstraction of painterly brushwork and gesture; the entanglement of mark-making, color, and texture integrates an array of references as well as a constantly growing archive and vocabulary for self-quotation and development; The painting combines paint and prints (collage) and engages with the grid – a visual structure that lies at the heart of much graphic design as well as being their organizing principle. Light and pigment permeate the material, further complicating perceptions of flatness and volume. Different varnishes as a means of producing visual effects, demonstrate a striking pivot in how qualities of light, presence, and substance are expressed.
The compositions venture into various configurations of spatial expression created by the superimposition of layers of paint and layers of prints. The result is a work that occupies a space between painting and its digital double, leaving a picture plane marked by an effortlessly elegant dance of smudges, puddles and saturated strokes.
Combining print making with oil painting, its fusion with the overpainted readymade (printed pages, ads, hotel stationery) represents a way of revitalizing the painting process;
a constant juggling of different layers, speeds, materials, mediums and effect.
This process speaks of one of Vahlefeld’s significant preferences: to introduce the painterly into the graphic, and vice versa, forcing the two modes together in a single image and then to let it go, allowing material to alchemize independently.
Readymade names and brands, logos and typography appear on the surface of the canvas.
These inscriptions are transformed into a linguistic proposition, which undermines the alleged essence of abstract painting.
In the new work, Vahlefeld alternates between the act of erasing and the act of painting over, repeatedly wiping away paint to create layers, blocks of color and hazy washes.
The artist describes the cycle of composition and loss inherent to this process as an attempt to harness the condition of doubt into a generative creative force.
Pigment prints are superimposed over the first elements, which cover the canvas and yet their placement is often hard to distinguish from the underlying layer because they are sanded back.
Fragments showing typography, graphic design and other form of signage animate the surface.
However abstract the work may be, it is subtly in dialogue with its evolving cultural landscape.
Peter Vahlefeld uses gestural brushwork reminiscent of action painting:
violent and energetic mark-making, on a variety of surfaces, ranging from thickly plopped-on and opaque paint to thin transparent washes, that reveal a recurrent delight in surface, and texture.
He dislocates these items from their known context and injects them with new value.
Overpainting them again and again and then superimposing them onto one another on canvas, he is exploring the use of culturally charged symbols as an abstract language.
In this lush and textural painting the image is literally brought to surface through calculated action as different varnishes become thicker and more complex, trapping metallic pigments like gold, silver and copper and the evidence of the process of oxidization.
The use of different varnishes and UV coatings, together with oil paint, absorb, reflect and diffuse light and enhances the capacity of the surface, creating a depth of pictorial space.
This working process is about continuous re-assembly, re-organisation and re-construction of the overpainted image, zigzagging between creation, ruin and epiphany.
The play of massive brushstrokes, sinking or rising, succumbing to gravity or mysteriously released from gravity, is registered in its full force.
Calibrating the weight of each color and tone, and creating space by varying the texture of his medium, Peter Vahlefeld conjures depth from almost nothing.
In this series, Peter Vahlefeld translates overpainted ads for international galleries into paintings on aludibond, mimicking the aesthetic of a high glossy photographic print, and at the same time eliminating a lot of the photographic surface by putting thick impasto of oil paint over it.
The brushstrokes obscure the photographic screen, eliminating unnecessary detail—allowing interesting relations to pop up between paint, image, fabrics and to bridge the gap between abstract painting and photographic representation.
It is like erasing something, and to open an aesthetic threshold between pure disorganized sensation, and the picture as a digitally reproduced image with paint on top.
For this artwork Peter Vahlefeld overpainted an ad of Louis Vuitton »Die Kunst des Reisens«.
The overpainted ad has then been digitized and reworked on the computer, before it has been blown up as a pigment print mounted on Aludibond.
Rendering the three-dimensional overpainting as a two-dimensional background, it has been partly overpainted again to conceal the preceding original.
With thickly applied oils, lacquer and different mediums, the artwork establishes a complex relationship between paint and the digitalized image of paint.
Because of the print on Aludibond and its glossy surface (UV protection), the artwork seems like a photographic representation of an abstract painting, distributing a wealth of visual events across its photographic surface.
For this series of overpainted artworks Peter Vahlefeld mined ads in »Artforum« and »Frieze« of a Baselitz exhibition in Salzburg.
The overpainted ads have then been digitized and reworked on the computer, before they’ve been blown up as pigment prints mounted on Aludibond.
Rendering the three-dimensional overpainting as a two-dimensional background, they have been partly overpainted again to conceal the preceding original. With thickly applied oils, lacquer and different mediums, the artwork establishes a complex relationship between paint and the digitalized image of paint. Because of the print on Aludibond and its glossy surface (UV protection), the artwork seems like a photographic representation of an abstract painting, distributing a wealth of visual events across its photographic surface.
Pigments like gold, silver, copper, aluminium, and iron mixed with water-based mediums are the starting point for this series.
By experimenting with gestures, source images of overpainted printed matter provide a catalyst to delve into what is hidden and what is seen.
The obliteration of the motifs by gigantic brushstrokes as a performative process of dragging, scraping, combing, raking and squeegeeing paint, pigments, and mediums across the surfaces are the subject matter of the paintings.
The background remains saturated through grooves made by smaller brushstrokes until the canvas picks up textures, gestures and happenstance along the way.
The light hides itself in the crevices of silver, gold, and copper, sculpted by the line of the brush and the oxidization of the pigments.
In this lush and textural painting the image is literally brought to surface through calculated action as different varnishes become thicker and more complex, trapping metallic pigments like gold, silver and copper and the evidence of the process of oxidization. The use of different varnishes and UV coatings, together with oil paint, absorb, reflect and diffuse light and enhances the capacity of the surface, creating a depth of pictorial space. This working process is about continuous re-assembly, re-organisation and re-construction of the overpainted image, zigzagging between creation, ruin and epiphany.
