U NL E SB AREB IL D ER - Peter Duka
U NL E SB AREB IL D ER - Peter Duka
U NL E SB AREB IL D ER - Peter Duka
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Landscapes that could only exist in art spread<br />
into the twilight under blue and white skies.<br />
Picturesque ruins stand washed by the sea, or<br />
sit amid verdant, fairytale scenes ashimmer<br />
with turquoise lakes. There are rocket silos,<br />
battleships and submarines but, interesting-<br />
ly, their bellicose significance never punctures<br />
these magic, nocturnal idylls. Beached like a<br />
great whale, the mottled submarine rests in<br />
the shallows of a sparkling expanse of water,<br />
blending rather than contrasting with the<br />
landscape. The rockets on their launch ramp<br />
also look fossilized, a sculptural symbol of a<br />
shot never to be fired. <strong>Peter</strong> <strong>Duka</strong>’s landscapes<br />
nearly always pan an extremely broad, hori-<br />
zontal sweep, toying with paradoxes, puzzles<br />
and unfathomable secrets. They sustain the<br />
notion of the picture as the locus of a serious<br />
aesthetic experience. Such experience cannot<br />
be grasped in the pragmatic, plus-or-minus<br />
terms of actual calculation. It is incalculable<br />
and must, by nature, remain utopian.<br />
I L L E G I B L E P I C T U R E S<br />
S T E P H A N B E R G<br />
In essence, of course, this is a romantic project:<br />
one that speaks of visual and other yearnings,<br />
of desire perennially unfulfilled. Thus the land-<br />
scaped gardens of the 18th and 19th centuries<br />
serve as foundations for <strong>Duka</strong>’s work, as they<br />
represent a demonstrable “hot seam” between<br />
image and reality. Paintings influenced the<br />
landscape and garden designs of the period;<br />
subsequently, the landscapes and gardens<br />
created according to these designs became the<br />
subjects of other paintings. In other words, it is<br />
here, as nowhere else, that the picture realizes<br />
its primordial longing for a world shaped in its<br />
own image. <strong>Peter</strong> <strong>Duka</strong> and his long-standing<br />
artistic partner Caroline Bittermann deal with<br />
this theme in their project, “Die Dritte Kammer”<br />
(The Third Chamber), which they started in<br />
1995. Their idea becomes reality in the spa-<br />
cious “Secret Gardens of Rolandswerth” at<br />
the ARP MUSEUM, Rolandseck Station. As a<br />
“walk-in picture,” this garden has become an<br />
ideal place for reviewing the reality of pic-<br />
tures and the pictorial nature of reality.<br />
However, a complex set of metaphors is al-<br />
ways at work in these paintings. Its purpose<br />
is to devise ideas and concepts as plastic con-<br />
structs which, despite their purported tangi-<br />
bility, remain opaque and impenetrable. The<br />
ruins are always fragmentary and fragile, under-<br />
lining more than the contrived, constructed,<br />
artificial aspects of these scenarios. The con-<br />
stant recomposition of identical or similar<br />
architectural features into surreal, hybrid ar-<br />
chitecture also makes it clear how far <strong>Duka</strong>’s<br />
buildings are actually constructs of ideas.<br />
They are textures, whose horizon ranges from<br />
the crumbling remains of a failed modernism<br />
to Novalis, and finds its fulfilment in the claim,<br />
made in his 1789 “Notes for a Romantic Ency-<br />
clopaedia,” that “the accomplished specula-<br />
tion leads back to nature.” Suspended over-<br />
head are luminous, orange-red baroque scrolls,<br />
frozen in form and completely without text.<br />
This makes sense, because the pictures them-<br />
selves are the text. And they can only unfold<br />
their imaginative power by remaining illegible.