Peter Vahlefeld
Analog and Digital Painting.
Everything is an opportunity to be made and remade again.
In his painting practice, Peter Vahlefeld brings together a range of materials across the canvas. Resin, varnish, different mediums, metallic pigments like gold and silver, acrylics, and oil paint, are layered with squeegees, brooms, brushes and hands.
Fields of color underlaid with pigment prints and printed fabrics are interrupted with richly pooled, dripped and poured paint, revealing the physical autonomy of the chosen media and dealing with their contradictions. The artwork occupies a threshold between the painterly mark and a picture, defined by Pop as a commodified image. It’s the gesture, the pictorial act that counts, the making of the canvas in terms of action of painting. The brushstroke—or better yet, the brush’s path—is always visible. Parts of the canvas remain blank and thus mark an important component of the painting, a purposely intended compositional element of incompleteness.
This vibrant mixed-media painting, which takes a patchwork approach to pattern and abstract composition, shows how colors influence each other and their surroundings.
Regardless of how meticulously planned or conceived this work might be, it has a buoyant energy that prizes spontaneity, if not randomness.
Initial layers of oil paint combined with metallic pigments like gold and silver are almost completely obscured by subsequent ones, with masking tape methodically used both to inscribe grids and preserve areas of interest.
Despite the controlled character of this process, leaving bare canvas as the composition evolves, thickly applied patches of paint resist control and tend to override demarcations inscribed by the tape, only to emphasize this productive sense of instability.
Compositions seem to emerge as if by virtue of their own will, according to an innate, almost biological rhythm that reflects the plasticity of paint itself.
Everything is an opportunity to be made and remade again.
Regardless of how meticulously planned or conceived this work might be, it has a buoyant energy that prizes spontaneity, if not randomness. Initial layers of oil paint combined with metallic pigments like gold and silver are almost completely obscured by subsequent ones, with masking tape methodically used both to inscribe grids and preserve areas of interest.