Volker Behrend Peters

The work of Volker Behrend Peters consistently refuses to accept any concrete pictorial object.The viewer quickly realizes that the reduction of the space to a two-dimensional surface is canceled.The depth effect of the work is produced by classical painterly means: not however in the sense of a light-dark gradation in the coloring - by the layering of the paint application to plastic structures depth develops.

Only by the movement in front of the screen, in the changing light of the light, is the spatial, the plasticity of the works shown; resulting from shadows and light appear tectonic reliefs, such as reef landscapes, traversed by branching aisles.The color application is, in itself, the most prominent design means: some areas of the canvas are only covered by a thin layer of color, while a centimeter thick wax plate grows out of it.And as the monochrome works seem to show, these works, which are held in individual colors, seem animated, vegetative color forms are on the canvas. This vitality does not only consist in the color of the pictures but above all in their relief character.

The material paraffin used plays a decisive role in the production of this color relief.

Unlike conventional oil or acrylic paints, the wax solidifies immediately after being applied to the canvas (the painter himself speaks accordingly of condensation), the time, the oil or acrylic paint for the drying does not need, and the painter thereby becomes a temporal almost immediate and sustained reaction to the result: Peter starts with a precisely formulated picture idea. With the first colors on the screen, ridges, surfaces - the smallest bumps on the canvas.

A pattern is formed which, in the case of further overpaintings, emerges more and more from the background of the picture and its precise shaping can be controlled only to a limited extent.This peculiarity, which is peculiar to the material properties, always requires the artist to keep his eye on the painterly means to which he approaches his goal, the finished picture as the correspondence of the idea formulated at the beginning.

On the fine ridges and dots, produced by the first brush strokes on the canvas, more and more material accumulates in layers, and as in the crystallization of a saturated solution, a coherent structure is formed on the canvas from solitary forms.Through their appearance, Volker Behrend's works move in a tension field of canonical concepts of technology, and assignments to the tendencies of contemporary painting are made more difficult.

Different classical styles / positions / etc. are differently reflected by the artist and with the means of the material fundamental similarities are found in distant, supposedly contradictory, ideologically widely distant standpoints and clarified.The painter deals with the most original questions of painting, looks for its core, the play of light and shadow, light and dark, and its spatial visualization.

From the discussion of these questions, which can not be answered, the work deals with its actuality.

Text: Markus Lettner