Leta Peer - Flurs

Leta Peer is a painter who also makes use of photography – in a “classical” sense, gently exploring her motifs, but commanding a high level of reflexion which, in a contemporary fashion, interweaves private and communal, imagination and factual reality. With this work she thematises home and identity and eventually the placing of an individual in their civilisation. Biographic experience is confronted with a sober view of the given reality; references and moods inherent in the picture sound out the relationship between objectivity and subjectivity even further.

Since 2000 Leta Peer’s paintings have almost exclusively portrayed the Engadin valley in Switzerland where she grew up surrounded by her family. We see landscape extracts, mountain tops, and meadows with their vegetation, from various angles, sometimes seen from below and with a picturesque immediacy where, from up close, the flowers and the rock faces shrouded in mist dissolve into sensual brush strokes. These paintings are sealed with varnish, which further intensifies the complex relationship between attraction and distance, depiction and spatial recollection.

Leta Peer deliberately circumvents some of the essential expectations one generally has of the medium of painting. She trusts the landscape, which exists unvaryingly and beyond the sphere of human intervention, and yet depicts it as a fragile ideal. Time might be absent yet it always finds its way into the paintings – in the daily routines, the lighting, and the weather conditions.

The photographs, on the other hand, are characterised by a rigid objectivity; they generally show time-worn interiors which have been abandoned but which, with their furnishings, still hint at the former occupants. Over the years Leta Peer has intensified the relationship between the artistic media and used digital processing to incorporate individual paintings in the rooms, inserted in an elaborate, at times antiquated frame, as if they had always been there. Leta Peer has hung the painting itself (with is own sensuality and presence) in the exhibition space as a complementary installation. The separately autonomous works become a unity in which the different levels of artificiality and naturalness examine and penetrate each other and call one another into question.

This also applies to the latest group of works. The Chasa Jaura Museum of Local History in the Swiss village of Valchava, which shows contemporary art in a historical Engadin house, is the point of departure. Here we find the Münstertal valley with the Lü meadows. Whilst Leta Peer specifically chose the exterior space for her paintings, she initially did not consider the interior spaces, which she merely documented photographically during her stay. It was not until two years later that the two kinds of images, techniques, at times “worlds”, came together for Leta Peer.

An example is the photographic work Flurs Index 2, in which she has integrated the painting Wiesen bei Lü GF Index 100– the meadows of Lü. It shows a small bedroom, austere and only furnished with the bare necessities, with a bed and a mirror on the uneven, whitewashed wall. The adornments on the items reveal traditional workmanship and witness the attachment to the native soil. The frame encloses the painted extract of the landscape; bars have been fitted into the frame, separating the painting into four transverse or longitudinal oblong sections.

The depiction in this space acts like an outlook into a different world, as direct as a window or a mirror: with a field in bloom, where violet and white flowers and grass grow tall, above them a clear grey-blue sky.

The view outside reflects back into the small chamber. The room itself is filled with life – colour, movement – which spreads to the interior (with its slightly wavy blanket or the intersecting beams of the edge of the bed). Memory and realisation, pausing and mental activity occur simultaneously.

With works of this kind, the expression of a conscious, systematic exploration, the Swiss artist Leta Peer accomplishes an enormous act of remembrance. Combining conceptual appraisal, craftsmanship, and her trust in the “simple” things in life she gives seemingly worn-out subjects a depth and a topicality and makes us more aware of them. In a haunting fashion, one unique in contemporary art, she gets to the bottom of those things which hold our world together.

Dr. Thomas Hirsch
Herbert-Weisenburger-Stiftung, Rastatt/Germany