"Ghosts of gestures in search of meaning Freitag images eerily
empty"
by Peter Goddard
The Toronto Star;
Toronto; July 17, 2003
on the soloshow of Peter Freitag "Examples for Communication"
June 26 through July 26, 2003
at TPW Gallery
80 Spadina Ave. #310
Toronto, Ontario M5V 2J3
Phone: 416.504.4242
In Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections, a novel about a family in emotional
freefall, an older man begins to doubt he's even lived the life he thought
he lived.
Instead, he has "the suspicion that everything was relative, that the
'real' and 'authentic' might not be simply doomed but fictive to begin
with ... These were the suspicions that had lain in ambush in all those
motel rooms. These were the deep terrors beneath the flimsy beds."
Much the same territory - the terrors found in the familiar-yet-not-familiar
- is traveled in Peter Freitag's show, "Examples For Communication" at
Gallery TPW.
Having digitally stripped down photo images found in ordinary travel
brochures, the Berlin-based artist has conjured up an orderly, empty world
where people are doomed to an infinity of leisure-time activities in cheap,
cheery hotel rooms.
Here, the line between the heavenly and the hellish is minuscule.
There's a family of four in Example For Communication #30 (2000). (As
if emphasizing the series' notion of repetitive banality, Freitag calls
each of the 16 large-scale photo works an Example For Communication.)
In #30, Dad's hands tell us he has just said or is about to say something.
(You notice hands when looking at Freitag's work likely because he's removed
what was originally in them. Kids play without their toys. A young woman
stares into a bedspread, missing the book she might have been reading
before the artist made it vanish.)
Junior, his eyes downcast, seems pouty. You can't tell what's going on
with Sis, seeing only the back of her head. But Mom is having such a great
time! She's got such a great big smile on her face. But why is she looking
up to her left, like that? And why up so high? No one standing just outside
the picture frame could be that tall, could they?
But what's startling is not what's missing, such as whatever motivated
two couples to sit so purposefully in a nondescript room in Example For
Communication # 29 (2000). Was it food? Or a game of cards?
The answer really doesn't matter. What's startling is what is still visible,
the scenes of interaction that are inexplicable and plausible at once.
You may even know why, although you can't quite put your finger on it.
Indeed you sense it might be better if you didn't.
Freitag's figures seem to realize what Franzen's folks fear in The Corrections
- that life is pure empty gesture. The meaning can be filled in with details
later.
These happy, peppy people are always on the point of doing something.
But what? It's unnerving for the viewer to have no evidence what it could
be.
What's doubly - and fabulously - unnerving is that Freitag's characters,
with their perfect figures and perfect smiles, have no idea, either.
"The main idea of my whole work is about expectation and disappointed
expectation," the artist writes in an e-mail from Germany.
"For me, that works best when I use found material like advertisement
pictures. There's always a perfect world shown. If one is not aware of
what he is looking at or how he is thinking about it, he will be running
around with an expectation that he could reach these perfect worlds in
his own life. (He) might be disappointed when it doesn't work."
The entire series could be called Neo-Pop Art. For all the digital processing
that needs to go into each image - Freitag fills in the empty space created
when he removes an image - the result is painterly, the way the original
pop stars like Jasper Johns or Roy Lichtenstein made you understand that
painting was the purpose behind their borrowings from advertising and
celebrity magazines.
As with the earlier pop artists, Freitag layers the surface of his work
with the evidence of the cheap printing the original ad brochures went
through.
Each Example For Communication swims in a sea of stressed and exaggerated
colour filtered through a net of tiny dots.
"Most of the time I work with images from cheap brochures because they
are constructed simply - the people always have the same smile, the furniture
is always arranged in the same way," his e-mail continues.
The viewer probably knows what the original brochure images looked like,
the process of perception continues when "you start to mistrust (all)
the scenery because you know it is manipulated even if you don't see exactly
what was manipulated," he continues, "you start to mistrust photography
if you haven't done so before."
Then "you start thinking about what you would expect from scenery like
this." Although "Examples For Communication" is about photography, the
process leading to the final photographic images is more "a process of
painting, collage or de-collage than a process of photography," writes
Freitag.
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