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Gisela Kuoni, Kunst-Bulletin No 11, 2007

Painted photographs and photographed paintings – this could be a way to summarize the works by Leta Peer in the Galerie Fabian & Claude Walter in Zurich. Yet behind these terms there is far more.

Zurich: Leta Peer in Galerie Fabian & Claude Walter

Leta Peer is from Lower Engadin, a landscape that marks or at least influences sensitive natures. Today she lives and works in Basel, but her inspiration still comes from the primal landscape of this high mountain valley. Her procedure is unusual. The artist does not look for motifs for her photographs, she allows them to emerge, seemingly without intention. She waits for special light situations in the morning or in the twilight; she loves the misty moods that are untypical of Engadin, the cloudy skies, the landscapes ruffled by rain or premature snow – places that she seeks out again and again. She paints in her studio, and then the photos are the models for her oil paintings. These are characterized by a meticulous manner of painting, by precision and the greatest care, by a fine poetry. This applies equally to the smallest miniatures with their intensive coloration, as well as to the large format, schematic mountain atmospheres that she imbues with structure using calligraphic drawing. Naturalistic, rain-washed meadow segments focus the viewer’s gaze on what is close at hand. The viewer does not see the photographs, the “models” then.

The series “Along with Simon” is based on a very personal story. It involves the death of her brother, to whom the artist devotes both a remembrance and a farewell in her paintings. That is all one needs to know. The brother took pictures on his way along the Via Engiadina, his last way. Leta Peer followed these pictures and turned the photo sequences into oil paintings, excerpt-like, not as replicas true to nature. Knowing the story, one suddenly sees more.

For “Mirrors” Leta Peer took the oil paintings based on her brother’s photos, framed in golden mirror frames, and placed them digitally in the kitchen of a neighboring bakery that was just being demolished. We see an irritating situation: a painterly landscape laden with memories, ennobled by the precious frames and then distorted by the desolate surroundings. The room itself becomes an additional picture frame.

Leta Peer has skillfully captured and subtly depicted the collision of beauty and decay, the tangible memory of a warm, life-giving bakery and the brutality of demolition, the diffusion of reality and transience.

Until December 21, 2007

 
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