Peter Reitberger
An interview with François Maher Presley
François Maher Presley: Your work appears to be characterized by two areas: hard, graphic lines; very flat materiality in strong colors that jump out of the picture. Together, however, the one requires the other in order to hold the pictures together. How do you develop your color compositions and is it so that the strict graphics hold the picture together, draw a line for it?
Peter Reitberger: The main interest in my painting is primarily the expressiveness of color. Color is conveyed most convincingly through the surface: first of all, a first color surface is created, mostly out of a willful impetus, out of pure desire for a certain color or a certain color material. In the next step, I react to this first surface with the other colored surface, which is usually somewhere in the complementary area, both in terms of color value and its haptic character, with the aim of creating tension. Where these two surfaces adjoin each other, material-related faults arise that have nothing to do with graphic demarcation or even scaffolding. Sometimes the surfaces are so narrow that they appear like lines - but they are always surfaces.
If at the beginning there is color, the desire for color, the question of the content that you want to convey quickly arises. Does this develop with the process of composition, similar to Kafka once said that his stories continue to write themselves while writing, or are you primarily concerned with composing aesthetics?
The focus is not so much on the composition of aesthetics as the dialectical development of further color fields with the aim of creating a harmonizing tension. A “process-like” - to stick with Kafka - development of the picture begins. I am aware that the design of the colored areas is always related to my autobiography.
You mentioned a relation between the designed colored areas and your biography. Her parents were in the diplomatic service. You traveled a lot with them, lived in different cultures, even times, you could say. Do you combine experiences with colors, with structures, and do you implement social, political or economic contexts in the design of your work?
The juxtaposition of different colored surfaces reflects the diverse international economic and cultural areas in which I grew up. Local color competes with shadowy atmospheric memories of local conditions.
A harmonizing tension alone is certainly enough to convey an external effect and ultimately can only be assessed in terms of aesthetics. But what is the content of the offer for the viewer, for a society, in order to shape development based on the idea of your work here too?
My painting describes an attitude towards life in a globalized world structure based on my own life experience. It offers the viewer the opportunity to be reflected in these global landscapes and perhaps to find his or her position in terms of responsibility, especially now that global climate change is challenging every single person.
This view of your very extensive work will not be clear to the fast viewer. Perhaps also the unconscious feeling of each individual helps that color, structure and form take over from the work, an impression, a suggestion willingly accepts and these unconscious impressions with the own experiences of the people, with their own symbols and insights become a common feeling mixed up in relation to your unobvious concern, i.e. actually also a bit of your attitude towards life, your feelings and your suggestions for getting around, even if now expanded to include the perception of the viewer?
The viewer will certainly notice the initially heterogeneous painting style of my pictures, that is, that the respective color fields of a picture are always worked with a certain technique and thus border each other more or less closely. These separate fields of color represent the different regions that I have come to know since my earliest days. This collaging painting technique develops through the painting process into a tension-laden harmony, ie all opposites of different regions react with one another. Here is my offer to the viewer to identify with the variety of colors in order to develop more awareness of our globalized world and thus his own position in it.
I notice four formats you have used. On the one hand 160 cm x 160 cm, then the smaller format of 120 cm x 120, as well as 40 x 50 cm and recently the small format 15 cm x 15 cm. The painting technique is the same everywhere. It is also possible everywhere, even with the very small formats, to set even large areas in a balanced manner without breaking the frame. What is the reason for the different choice of formats in your work, and is the idea you just described the focus of the small works?
The square is the most neutral image format. Since I don't know at the beginning where the painting process is going, I keep the definition of above and below open as long as possible. In the large formats, I developed the abstract, globalized landscape images, which through their size alone achieve a presence that cannot be overlooked. I found the rectangular upright formats with a landscape character to be a challenge, because such landscape layers get completely different, much more abstract and therefore more ambiguous aspects. This is countered by the very small formats with the same topic. On palm-sized formats, complete abstract landscapes are created which, together with the large formats, point to a micro-macrocosm-like relationship, perhaps in reminiscence of the painter Wols, who in the 1940s scratched his hand lines on palm-sized erasers.
The small pictures in particular seem a little therapeutic. One can imagine that the viewer intervenes in Reitberger's work and participates in the work, in size and scope, in statement and expression through the very personal choice and composition of the pictures that appeal to him. Art as communication between artist and viewer, also bringing in your own worldview, a kind of visual discussion?
Franz chases across Bavaria in his totally neglected taxi- This Panagram, a sentence in which every letter of our alphabet occurs at least once, is the title of a comprehensive installation made up of many of these small landscape pictures, which was shown for the first time in September 2009 in the Factory of the Arts, later in an expanded form with new ones Work is shown. The 26 letters each stand for a color, and the sentence itself represents a wonderful, surreal picture of my nomadic wandering life in my early youth. I would like to invite the viewer to this journey.
