The Amsterdam gallery is currently showing a selection of film photos by Bart Julius Peters titled ‘The Artist’s Repertory.’
Compressed into spacious rooms on the first floor, the apartment atmosphere is ruled by ten remarkable photos that become decontextualized and lend the feeling of being in someone’s living room rather than being exhibited in an art gallery. That sentiment of visiting someone’s private obsession in black and white or, in two cases, shaded in with citric green (Villa D’Esté, 2022) or ancient rose (Versailles’ ‘René Daniels’, 2018), the colors correlating to the specific radiance of that day when Bart Julius Peters shot them.
Let’s all agree and call each photo– regardless of size– episodes from a series dedicated to major beauty, all of them incandescent to the eye even when there’s no light. Each image for this show was curated through the photographer’s masterful eye, whose duty is to extract it all with a natural manner. Housing such a name’s work– framed, frameless, or hanging on the wall like a sticky-note– shuts any craving of the digital world.
The moment is rather pleasant when you realize that the building seems to have no front or back– both huge side windows frame the view of promised Amsterdam and the glass roof on the second floor is part of an acclimatized greenhouse.
Traveling through EENWERK’s exhibition floors and rooms might feel insufficient at first, but we recommend that you look through the windows on each interval before facing the next perspective– the same one that dominates the precise definition of the artist’s printed work. Bart Julius Peters pays serious attention to those green labyrinths and paths nature gives us while his camera’s mechanical curtain eye opens and closes in quick succession in order to remain the phototeller we want.
If the photos of three pears (Pear, 2015) contain explicit rhythm at its best, then the nearby body portrait of a naked woman taken from the rear (Venus Diagonal, 2017) speaks even louder into the room and towards the other three ergonomic natural shapes. Each of them partaking in the same sensual repetition.
Near the end, a sequestered flower bouquet on the window side shocked us. Why spend your life appropriating nature’s flowers by cutting their stalks endlessly when you could look, uninterrupted, at a photo bouquet (Bouquet Van Loon, 1999) shining deep in your eyes and giving you that rush? Why again?
Best,
Marcelo Horacio Maquieira Piriz
