P E T E R - R A S M U S S E N

1954 born in London
Chelsea School of Art BA Fine Art Painting

Collections
Senat Berlin (Arts Council Berlin)
Gesellschaft für Erdkunde zu Berlin (Geographical Society Germany)
Residency Awards (Residencies)
Casa Manilva, Andalucia
Delfina Studio Trust
Fundacion Valparaiso, Andalucia
Cil Rialaig Project, Republic of Ireland
Vermont Studio Centre, USA

'Partly mono-prints and partly painted in oil directly onto paper, his works have the quality of framed film stills; the slightly distancedfeel of moments of frozen narrative.'

Sue Hubbard, The Independent

Peter Rasmussen has developed a technique combining painting and monoprinting whereby two surfaces (canvas and paper) are alternately painted and printed onto each other. Continued and repeated, this process becomes a dialogue of surfaces at the end of which one or both surfaces may emerge as finished image or be continued in a further exchange with new canvas or paper. This constant alternation of the direct and mediated brushstroke is a way of processing figurative subject matter towards its own painterly autonomy.

In the movement of paint and the exchange of painted surfaces the figures, objects, surroundings, interiors and landscapes jostle together as equal servants of circumstance. The motive and the background, the space referred to and the fabricated space, the brush stroke and its mediated response are in constant negotiation.

`What I transfer to paper is not this coexistence of perceived things as rivals in my field of vision. I find the means of arbitrating their conflict, which makes depth.’

M. Merleau-Ponty Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence

‘Untitled’ is from a series of paintings entitled ‘skin’ which deal with the nature of perception and its Siamese twin imagination.

At first glance the image appears as a grid, formed of horizontal red and vertical green stripes, resembling a tablecloth. Closer inspection reveals the painting as readable in terms of the implied space and in relation to its process and the chronology of its making.

The stripes and the order in which they were laid down are read in the overlapping layers of paint and also registered in the gradual ‘dirtying’ of succeeding stripes as they are dragged over the underlying ones.

The stripes recede within the picture space from the outer ones to the centre so that a three-dimensional structure of two inverted intersecting roof shapes may be inferred. I am interested in the visual negotiation between the initial ‘retinal’ impression of a grid composed of complimentary colours and the ‘reading’ of the spatial precedences and the dynamic that this shift creates.

 

 

 

Untitled (H406P), 2006 oil on paper 124.5 x 100cm