Peter Vahlefeld

Peter Vahlefeld's work explores the visible and veiled aspects of the dissemination of images. The paintings are both complex and multilayered, emotive pictorial palimpsests regarding his use of superimposed sources, which carry an iconographic set of references. By painting lushly on top of them he expropriates their surface, language and semantics. Hijacking material from the public domain and obscuring them, Vahlefeld further complicates the everyday transaction of images by taking away the content they are supposed to advertise. All compositions venture into various configurations of spatial expression created by the superimposition of layers of paint and layers of prints—marks scanned, collaged, re-photographed, printed, over-painted—the result is a work that occupies a space between painting and its digital double, leaving a picture plane marked by an effortlessly elegant dance of smudges, puddles and saturated strokes.