Ralf Peters - works : B. Knaus Fine Art

Horizontals

In his “Horizontals” work group Peters configures a snapshot and in doing so undermines its purported authenticity. The photographs feature moving vessels, a group of paragliders hovering over a canyon landscape or the movements of people in colorful rain capes who look as though they have been frozen. In each instance, the horizon hangs low in the image, near the bottom edge. Peters opens the image upwards towards the top edges through the dominating area occupied by sky. This gives rise to an impression of movement that guides the viewer’s gaze in the corresponding directions. The series makes it clear that Peters’ approach to photography is conceptual in nature: He studies and documents his environment before reconfiguring individual elements. The group of works forms a further characteristic example of Peters’ conceptual photography, which he understands as an expansion of sculpture. The arrangements in the “Horizontals” series all feature a wide panorama format and have a certain irritating quality that prompts questions regarding the relationship between true photograph and photomontage. “Japanese cherries” (2014) sees the artist configure numerous people dressed in rain capes, whom he previously photographed in a Japanese garden during his travels to Japan, in a sophisticated post-production process. The piece “Schiffe” (2017) was created over a period of several weeks. For this work, Peters photographed various cargo boats from the same viewpoint before assembling them in a single image on the computer. In doing so, the artist draws on a perfected, polished visual aesthetics of the mass media that shapes our visual horizon. In doing so, he irritates our perception – thus formulating an indirect criticism. More