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In the process of their creation, my paintings do not have any declared beginning. The canvases are often covered with traces of the studio even before the final format or subject matter has been determined. Often, the finished pieces are bipartite and consist of separate works that have been combined right in the middle of a work in process. Sometimes they are even cropped or divided while they are being made. These strategies are a refusal of a linear work process, and they are very important to me as an artist. Right up to the end, the paintings bear the risk of a fundamental change within and among themselves. |
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Peter Stauss
In the process of their creation, my paintings do not have any declared beginning. The canvases are often covered with traces of the studio even before the final format or subject matter has been determined. Often, the finished pieces are bipartite and consist of separate works that have been combined right in the middle of a work in process. Sometimes they are even cropped or divided while they are being made.
These strategies are a refusal of a linear work process, and they are very important to me as an artist. Right up to the end, the paintings bear the risk of a fundamental change within and among themselves.
The characters/actors in my works arise on the basis of each drawing. They, too, leave the context of their individual makings and come together into new semantic constellations within the paintings.
The figures in my works are ridiculous. According to their outfits and gestures, they are acting politically or ideologically, but the act stops in mid-course; it comes to grief through the doubts that can be read in the actors’ faces. They only pretend to experience emotional motivation and this causes them suffering. They are therefore authentic only in the self-chosen role of a victim with which they willingly put on show. Unfortunately, they scarcely have an audience. They only have assistants, apes and dogs, before whom they expound upon their convictions. Although the animals are dubious addressees of this presentation, they willingly imitate their masters.
With the same emblems, symbols and gestures, it is even the case that the animals are the more serious and more dominant. They do not have any problem with purposefulness, and they play the superior beings in this way.
Because they are not human beings, they seem to do this easily.
The figures are colonists; they come from outside and they come about through a process of constant drawing. The surroundings they break into are alien to them but, through their emblems and the legibility of their bodies, they defy the nameless presence of the spaces in which they find themselves. They seek to take something beneficial into possession, a warm little place in the midst of an enveloping structure. The arbitrary spot, however, does not want anything, not even to destroy them. It simply pops up, supports or destroys, but it does not co-operate.
Because the random form breaks into the existing paintings here and there, without subjection to its own parameters, it is always also an accident. Completely uninvolved, it takes its place without bothering with its surroundings. It comes about during the working process in parallel to the rest of the scene—falsely. The spot is based neither on any particular action nor on a period of work devoted exclusively to making it.
Thus, the protagonists are doomed to having to enter into a synthesis with the anarchic nature of the materials at hand, and at the risk of becoming deformed, maimed or completely eliminated. Their gestures and attributes are frozen into the paintings, diverted or led toward other aims.
In this way, they mature into experienced trappers, full of scars from an authentic struggle. The wounds inflicted upon them by the caprices of the spaces that they inhabit rehabilitate the embarrassing nature of their staging and give them a legitimation, which, as isolated figures, they could never attain. Only after this kind of self-colonization can the figures really live up to their task as pioneers and bestow their determination on the caprices besetting them.
