Fusion

The motives in the painting of Michael Peltzer seem to arise instinctively and without plan out of the flowing paint. They happen by chance and without help. There is something becoming apparent which has always been hidden in the potential of the colour. The apparently coincidental moments of the flowingly spreading paint are a kind of primeval mass which enfolds to a scenic whole though limited to a defined area. Through this a state of uncertainty comes to being, which is open towards the abstract as well as representational direction. It is both conflict and cooperation. As harmonizing cooperation the representational is given up, sacrificed for the painterly. The win however is the autonomy of surface, colour and shape.

The distanced and unfamiliar painting technique, now introduced art historically, creates another moment of a precarious balance of closeness and distance. The canvas lying on the ground, the colours are spread out flowingly. New creative possibilities like ornaments, patterns und representational elements like moving water, passing clouds or dissolving figures are brought to the surface. But especially the busts refuse to work as traditionally depicted portrait. They are dissolving and, reversely, have not yet emerged from the rough mass of paint to a clearly outlined, mimetic shape. Earlier than 1900 the sculptor Medardo Rosso had already developed and perfected / brought to a climax this idea of the “unfinished” in terms of sculpturing.

In this manner two conflicts evolve in Michael Peltzer´s painting: firstly, the all painting underlying conflict of form and content and secondly, the conflict of appearance and reality. An igneous power creating a reference to the outside of the picture by means of the substance of the material: an object, a figure, a landscape. This evokes an own dynamic and a dramatic character of the actually unspectacular objects having come to appearance. The stage of being “between”, of being unfinished is the decisive tensional moment. A moment in this peculiar pictoral world which is bound and due to the conditions of the painting.

(Dr. Ferdinand Ullrich)