Peter Pommerer
Galerie Gebauer, Berlin
Through October 14
Peter Pommerer’s art is light and fairytale-like. Yet it is
marked by something mildly obsessive too. Characters, such as elephants, and
various other elements crop up time and again in the artist’s installations.
By grouping together recurrent basic forms, Pommerer creates designs that seem
to repeat of their own accord; unfolding without a center, without narrative,
in an anti-linear and anti-hierarchical manner.
The ornamental compositions that the artist produces often stem from the rationalization
of his ‘automatic’ scribbled drawings. The scaled-up shapes are applied to the
walls and then filled with color to assume almost geometric forms. Pommerer
also works on the collective imagination. Taking elements from various codes
and languages (tattoos, graffiti, and the writings scrawled on public bathrooms),
he translates them into symbols that, drawing on our urban experiences, we can
all relate to.
For the exhibition Die Pest des Phantasmen – a title adopted from a book
by S. Sisek – the artist has created convivial rooms which transport the visitor
back to the lost paradise of their childhood. The walls are covered in collage
and drawings in crayon, watercolor and colored pencil. The exhibition unfolds
in the gallery’s three rooms. In one, the artist has applied a series of moving
penguin shapes to the wall, interspersed with photos of zoo animals.
In the other two rooms, he has produced a room/veranda facing onto a landscape
of enchanted castles that seem built from Lego. The hills are upturned ice-cream
cones, the sun is a slice of orange blazing with colored rays and the animals
– elephants, peacocks, birds – seem to come straight from story books. The appearance
of Kinderstammer (children’s room) is, however, deceptive.
On moving closer, the spectator starts to make out vulgar elements in the drawings,
obscure sexual motifs and naked fishtailed mermaids adopting porn-magazine poses.
Oriental and esoteric motifs are also interspersed in Pommerer’s designs, along
with random writings – words, figures, expressions and phone numbers – which
trigger short-circuits of meaning in the public perception.
Marina Sorbello
Translation by Rosalind Furness
