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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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