Distance proof
In a series of self-portraits, Christian Peter poses as different characters in theatrical situations that evoke the frailty or anticipate the death of the artist. Very brief stories, vignettes, as it were. Me, Myself and I are, in different roles and settings, both tragic and derisory.
The lines drawn by the gaze of the characters in his photography create a space that reveals the gulf between the photographer and the tragedy portrayed. This distance runs through all Christian Peter’s work.
In Factory-telling (2013) he returns to the site of factories that he knew when they were still operating to capture the light as it plays on architectural surfaces. Walls are tinted with gold and silver, with diamond-like reflexions. What remains of these walls in the swan song of disused factories, fragments of a world that is incredibly pictural and graphic.
Graphic composition that verges on the abstract is at the heart of the work of Christian Peter.
In Abstractions faites, he superimposes the near and the far in a single landscape. He renounces colour to combine two images in black and white, creating a third image which far surpasses the sum of the two originals. The landscape becomes a surface in which what is solid seems to become liquid – dense, mobile and shiny as mercury, quicksilver. the ground liquifies and the horizon blurs.
Several series of photographs, namely Ci-devant l’horizon, explore or play with ways of distorting the horizon, culminating in the radicality of La chute, begun in 2017, which replicates the line of the dam at Breisach Am Rhein, photographed from the same viewpoint at different seasons. Here again, as in Factory-telling, the image fractures, with the same shiny surfaces, pictural depth and abstraction.
Memento mori, as indicated by its more explicit title, brings together colour photographs taken at different moments and in different places, capturing the impermanence of things – a fragment of the sky that has fallen into a field, a fish that seems to leave water for the clouds, a horizon that tips onto a road contstruction site or a boat (?) falling into a canal. Opportunistic and sensitive at the same time, there are moments of grace when everything works together as if to hand him the image; at other times he waits patiently fot the moment when the weather and the position of the sun are just right – to catch the wreck in all its beauty.
The animated slideshow Blackbird has this same repetitive and aesthetic quality. Here, strangely – absurdly – the bird desesperately tries to fly through the glass behind which the photographer this expression of obstinate vitality, a mirror image of his own work.
Evelyne Loux – translation Jill Munro