Artists

Peter Zimmermann

Press release

Peter Zimmermann’s paintings possess the viewer with their amorphous shapes and jelly-like colors that leak from the canvas into our inner cortex. They capture us with an impressionism of colour, light and form, generating a sensory experience that interferes with our binary perception of the world today. We may believe that we are looking at a digital image such as a screen-saver, but this illusion is the result of Zimmermann’s technology of enchantment. Through a meticulous manual layering of epoxy paint spiked with pigment, he transgresses the precision suggested by computer-generated iconography and creates paintings that are mesmerizing both for their graceful beauty and ideational rigor. The new works on show at Nagel Draxler Berlin are watery in texture and soft to the eye. They draw one into their pools of colour that glide over one another mysteriously.

In his conceptual approach to painting, Zimmermann works with his personal archive of digital images all the while scouring the internet for changes in pictorial code. Having identified an element from his data bank, he defamiliarizes the original and reworks it using filters and graphic algorithms. The digital prototype becomes nothing more than a split second déjà-vu, a pulse of light remodeled through the manipulation of epoxy resin on canvas. As a result of this remarkable transubstantiation, Zimmermann not only deconstructs visual systems mediated by commercial marketing, but also defies the anachronism of painting as an affect-driven form of expression. Sources of light ricochet off the epoxy relief which, when photographed, dupe the eye into imagining fine sinuous lines of white pigment running across the landscape of luminescent colour.