Düsseldorfer Hefte, May 2008, Volume 53, Page 48

Souvenir Pictures, Concepts

Swiss painter Leta Peer sounds the potential of familiar motifs

In Leta Peer’s paintings everything seems clear. Since 1999/2000 exclusively representations of mountains and flower fields and landscapes are being made. Occasionally the same mountain returns in different views, the panorama of a mountain range seems to continue across different representations. The mountains alternate between barren, precipitous rock and snow-covered soft tops. Sometimes they are pushed to the lower picture margin and dominated by clouds, at other times they disappear in fog. They themselves remain untouched by any temporal conditionality; they seem to be detached and yet keep a corporeal presence. The landscapes and the meadows with flowers are captured accordingly; single blossoms in the foreground have a concrete plasticity and at the same time disintegrate into pure painting, the sequence of brush strokes. Such motifs, given in a supreme realism are topoi and therefore stereotypes – in which Leta Peer’s painting dodges this at once: in their seriousness, her paintings bear a high conceptual share.

Leta Peer, born in Winterthur in 1964 and presently living in Basel, quite naturally works her way into the history of the supreme in general and their subjects’ traditions in particular and yet acts, with her painting, contemporarily and extraordinarily. Contrarily to the parameters of nowadays’ world, to the mobility and global medial availability she speeds down perception. She devotes herself to some few, supposedly “worn out” motifs she’s looking for in one and the same region and later on captures artistically in her studio. The location is the Lower Engadine where she has grown up and which she, now, virtually maps with the meadows seen from close and the alpine mountain ranges seen from afar. The mountains surround the valley which, out of vision, still is present – as the painter’s position. Universal applicability and typicality go hand in hand with private identity: home turns out to be a major topic with Leta Peer – and for that she discovers the sublime icons of sentimental esteem, the thousandfold reproduced postcard motifs.

On the basis of small formats, remaining under 20cm in length, she has reduced this even more to absurdity in a subtle way: already in that the gigantic three-dimensional subject is being set on a tiny surface. On the edges these wooden boards are painted with gold, and their corners are rounded at times: once this makes one think of exquisite chocolate boxes. Then, with slightly upright formats, where only the upper corners are bent, the typical Lower Engadine windows are being quoted. The relationship between the inside and the outside is being touched upon, the restrictiveness has the boundless vastness in front of itself, the focusing hints at still an “another”, non-standard beyond the detail.

Now, all this also characterizes Leta Peer’s photographic works made parallel to “pure” painting. They are to be understood from an installation-like impetus, as an attempt of a further trial of the pictures and thus as a continuation of painting and its issues with different means. While briefly installing tiny paintings in public spaces in the 1990s, and thus documenting a subversive action, she has photographed the specific locations themselves and digitally inserted her paintings into the photographs. For her current photographic series, the “Mirrors”, she has introduced additional procedures of emphasis and objectivization. Starting point are five photographs of her late brother that describe the path through the home village with the landscape and the buildings and somehow anticipate the farewell. From these photographs Leta Peer has made medium-sized paintings, the series “Along with Simon”. These paintings she has digitally inserted, again, into luxurious frames and integrated into photographs of a worn interior, as if they had always been there. In other words, this rationally photographed interior is being confronted with the artistic weightlessness of the (inspired) exterior and revoked. Painting proves – also here – to be an existential awareness and comforting knowledge that all biography is accompanying us all our lives.

Thomas Hirsch, Düsseldorf

Leta Peer until June 7th 2008
Ruth Leuchter Gallery, Kronprinzenstr. 9, D-40217 Düsseldorf,
Tue-Fri 11 am – 1 pm, 3 – 6 pm, Sat 12 – 4 pm, www.ruthleuchter.de