BERLIN.- Artist Peter Klare appears for the first time at
Gallery Springer. His series of large size, painted-over photographs, entitled “Silver,” forms part of an extensive collection of urban and natural landscape photos which the artist, using the medium of painting, has altered in different ways. Montevideo, Los Angeles, Berlin and London, but also beaches and forests, become the studio for his technique of overpainting. As a result of the employment of this technique, each place unleashes a distinctive palette of colors and painting composition– photograph and painting reciprocally illuminate each other. Los Angeles is dominated by a golden bronze tone, Berlin carries the color of cheap sneakers, the forest features delicately nuanced natural shades and Montevideo overflows in a silver.
Strictly speaking, the technique of painting over photographs as employed in the series “Silver” achieves a “painting-away” of the world, of visible objects, which seem to Peter Klare to be unnecessary for the photographic image. The technique deliberately evokes notions of a particularly awkward manner of retouching. The application of the silver gouache is relaxed and freehanded and appears as an independent composition set against the photo. Thus the light-reflecting, metallic color bonds with the photographic background at the same time that it retains its own integrity as an image, counteracting the angles of perspective of the photograph.
By way of these immediate and obvious interferences a picture emerges that is no longer either a photograph or a pure painting. Developed by hand, Klare has enlarged the original motifs to such a degree that not only the smallest details become visible but also the grain of the film. Consequently, the photographic image can be understood as matter. The sparkling color seduces one to touch the picture and to experience a merging into the surface of a photo fluctuating and full of light. Once “immersed”, unexpected questions arise about the free space that has opened up between photo and gouache: “What was suppressed? What was not supposed to be?” and „What is possible?”
Painting is the medium that leads to this free space whose dimensions it moreover creates. Retrospectively, the act of painting interferes with the photographic testimonies of place and time and, under the silver cloak, enables the viewer to superimpose a separate image. Altogether, the scenes appear like deflated and distorted theatrical spaces while the shining of the silver color reaches out of the picture into the room. Thus the shadowy image spaces, with their physical presence can almost be grasped as objects.
The hazy screens evoke another group of works by Peter Klare, which he calls “Shapes”. Much larger in format than the painted over photos, the works of “Shapes” are abstract, asymmetrically-shaped wooden frames covered with canvas and mostly painted in a single color. Like the silver threads within the photos, the sculpted canvases initially blend naturalistically into the real world. However, in seeing them as abstract fragments of an imaginary set design, one has already entered the hidden area that lies behind the shadowy screens. This interplay is characteristic for all of Peter Klare’s works. The starting point is always the art of painting which serves as a means to question materiality.
Peter Klare’s art of painting is a critical method for reformulating the world and world views and for putting perception up for discussion.
Peter Klare was born 1969 in Jena. He studied painting in Montevideo and at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich. In 1998 he completed the MFA degree at the University of California, L os Angeles. Peter Klare’s works have been exhibited by Deitch Projects in New York City, at the Gallery Leyendecker in Santa Cruz, the Gallery Loevenbruck in Paris and the Union Gallery in London, among other venues.
