Peter Demetz

At international level, Peter Demetz is currently one of the leading sculptors of his generation, not only for his extraordinary technique which reinvented a traditional genre such as woodcarving, by making it totally contemporary, but especially for the beauty in the composition of his works, like the one of a Renaissance painting subjected to the acceleration of modernity. More precisely, Demetz uses the principle of “accelerated solid perspective” typical of the 15th to 17th century architecture, used by Bramante and Palladio, by combining it to the equally ancient “stiacciato” style, that was extraordinarily applied by Donatello, so that the outcome is a 3-D painting where the viewers – although unrelated to the composition – are dragged into the scene by the effect of the perspective to experience the loneliness of the figures with which they are forced to come into contact. Demetz is actually an existentialist artist and pushes the possibilities of the perspective to the extremes to build spaces that, for their nature, are small stages where he makes his characters move appearing in a condition of utter loneliness; characters that show the urge of hidden feelings in the steadiness of their movements, ready to explode and held in the steady restraint of the form: they are about to talk to each other, or they are alone and are looking beyond the rigid and monochromatic background, beyond doors/openings to other rooms that we cannot see, other worlds, other lives, or they simply look at themselves in the mirror, doubling their loneliness even if the mirror does not exist, a line is enough, but the ability of the artist is to deceive our eye and, by misleading us, he misleads them.