Peter Knauer. Transitions and In-Between Spaces

Peter Knauer’s central theme is multifaceted: “transitions – in-between spaces”. He perceives and interprets them not only within the urban environment. Although his works originate from direct visual experience, when our eyes follow the directions or movements of arches and lines, these transitions seem to dissolve into chromatic surfaces. For Knauer, surfaces are essential, as they initiate colour gradients and modulations. He abstracts, maintaining a deliberate distance from reality.

What remains constant in his paintings is, paradoxically, what is changeable: water, air, atmosphere — and colour in contrast with fixed geometric shapes, with steps and architectural elements, with static motifs that nevertheless call for movement. Perhaps this antagonistic tension is, in fact, the true underlying subject of his painting.

Everything flows, everything moves. When we look at a surface, we see how countless nuances follow one another until a boundary line appears — the point where a shape ends or another begins, introducing a new configuration of colours. This can produce a soft shift or a sharp break.

For Knauer, these transformations, transitions and visual surprises are much more than phenomena of an urban setting revealing perspectival shifts and spatial metamorphoses; they also stand for less tangible experiences in life, which continually demand reconsideration of one’s position and the evaluation of change from different points of view.

With the deliberately elusive expression “between space and time”, used as the title for some works, Knauer suggests a position that can only be understood through movement, since space and time are inseparably intertwined. His images therefore juxtapose multiple concepts: the eye floats within the composition and finds temporary support on steps that nonetheless lead into uncertainty. These remain signs — loci of perceptual shift.

His paintings hint at possibilities without fully defining them; their completion takes place in the mind of the viewer. Knauer avoids comforting narratives: his works arise from the convergence — almost the confrontation — of opposing methods. He paints surfaces as in a geometric composition and assigns some of them structures that evoke houses with windows. He then contradicts this planar, geometric approach with perspectival cuts or curves. And whenever the visual harmony becomes too seductive, he introduces bands that alter and estrange the architectural appearance, giving parts of the surface a rough layer. These strips correspond to the fragile transparency of the colours while being their opposite: they are raised, tangible, whereas the chromatic fields become increasingly transparent and delicate. Sometimes Knauer goes a step further and removes these slightly impasto bands; their traces remain as memories.

It is evident that a painter works similarly with colour: a tone applied to a surface gains or loses intensity depending on how it is modulated. It becomes more opaque or more transparent. This is how Peter Knauer achieves the possibility of depicting more than architecture — he paints atmosphere.

Jürgen Weichardt
Art critic