P. Valentine's paintings at the Kunstverein
"The viewer is placed in a position that enables him to gain a new way of looking at things." This is the intention that the Frenchman Peter Valentiner from Cologne has with his painting. An exhibition at the Kunstverein Marburg, Am Markt, shows paintings by the painter that were created over the last two years.
Each painting is the representation of a mere play of forms without any meaningful content. Peter Valentiner's work expresses his love of form and colour and also exhausts itself with it: a purely abstract painting reminiscent of cubism. It enchants the canvas into a mosaic-like pictorial landscape. The pictures resemble glimpses through a kaleidoscope, which can vary the constellation of its crystals at will by turning them, but which can also stop in a certain combination. The composition and interplay of simple colours and shapes are intended to express the relationship and interplay of "light and space".
The prism-like dissected representations transform colour into light and form not into surface but space. "Only these two basic elements remain the strict components of the pictorial language of my oeuvre. "This is the theme of Peter Valentiner's works: What effect does a form have on us? What effect does a colour have on us? The viewer is put in a state of confusion by this ambiguous way of looking at things. But at the same time, the confrontation with both elements is created. And this in a new way in each picture.
This also answers the question that arises when looking at Valentine's works for the first time: Is it all the same? A pupil in the 11th grade of the Martin-Lother-Schule asked. An art class of 20 pupils held their lesson with the artist in front of his works. Through a question and answer game, they came closer to Valentine's pictorial language.
The simultaneity, complementary, light-dark and cold-warm contrasts create an interplay of colour and form that puts opposites such as weights and floating, above and below, falling and rising in tension, but also evokes a balance.
The production process of his paintings can also be traced in the exhibition at the market. The first step is a pencil sketch. Using black ink, he then converts this into a black and white negative, using light rather than colour for the individual fields. After an enlargement, the resulting spatial compartments take on colourfulness with the help of stencils, again in the form of light sources, whereby Valentiner proceeds with broad brushstrokes in a kind of translucent glazing. Different contrasting effects and overlaps thus create, as he himself says, "foreground and background, freely moving islands of colour with irregular, sharp contours". The finished work of art in oil-acrylic mixed technique appears in an almost expressive colourfulness.
Birgit Andrich
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