Thursday 11 March 2010

Peter Piller: Regionales Leuchten

Marz Gallery (Lisbon)
Peter Piller: Regionales Leuchten

Peter Piller enlarges copies of printed images with no substantial focus or significant detail; he classifies and catalogues on a non-chronological order what was already fragmented. These are pictures that were taken from German regional newspapers, and from aerial images bought from a defunct company, whose business in the 1980s was to exploit German homeowner’s vanity. In the exhibition Regionales Leuchten, shown at Marz Gallery, there is no beginning or an end point.

What seems to be designated and arranged thematically into visual clusters accordingly to the photographer’s chance becomes an opportunity to reflect about social performance, historical meanings and the linear trends of thoughts. Clearly referring to Aby Warburg’s Der Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, or Thomas Ruff’s Zeitungsfoto, the set of photographs shown are decontextualised from their initial mode of consumption and use and are also ordered according to their theme similarity: Bürozeichnungen rub shoulders with Suchende Polizisten, and several pictures entitled Regionales Leuchten are in-between those from Ungeklärte Fälle. The work becomes sovereign on its won while responding to Piller’s momentary life experiences and the viewer’s own constructed history.

Up until recently, the exhibition layouts were conceived as a linear succession of formal conceptions, individual and collective experiences, each bearing a new perspective onto everyday life. However, in this particular case, what is on show is a vicious order making us travels from a frame in history into another historical frame. Piller’s visual archive recalls histories about particular times, places, scenes or events that were captured without further subjectivity or hidden agenda. He gives to the exhibition its own visual dynamics; it is formed as a registry and gives a glimpse record of everyday life on with a disconnected type of “visual writing”. When they need to illustrate reports regarding local stories, human beings indistinctively frame life without control into newspapers’ pages.

Published at Lapiz, Revista Internacional de Arte. Año XXIX, Núm. 259/260 (154), February/March 2010 España Peter Piller's exhibition view

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