Hans Peter Perner
CV
Hans Peter Perner, born in Tamsweg in the land of Salzburg, works as a freelance artist. He began painting in his youth and has since attended numerous art seminars and art academy classes. In 2011, he organized his first public exhibition, presenting his early works to the local public. Since 2014, he has been working as a freelance artist and restorer. In 2016, he set up a studio at his new home in Sauerfeld in order to have more space to work and to allow visitors to contemplate his world and reality.
Perner’s painting style resembles an act involving light and color, structures and layers. He considers his restoration work, a bona fide category in the field of visual arts, to be a valuable and instructive source of learning. The intense examination of the material color and of the diversity of the surfaces, in sculptural works as well as in panels, continues to sensitize this artist and bring him closer to his own focus in artistic creation: working with oil paints. Perner’s passion with this chromatic world has been ongoing since 2017.
Hubert Scheibl’s master class at the 2018 Summer Academy in Salzburg laid the cornerstone for Perner’s career as a professional painter. Perner’s desire to pursue this career was heightened by this renowned icon of abstract painting, and the impulse Perner felt is perfectly encapsulated in the title of the summer class: “Prozessuale Malerei, Gedächtnisrestl und Entschleunigung” (Process-related painting, remnants of memory and deceleration).
Themes
A central theme of the artist’s work is the perception that is held by present-day humankind of natural processes and elementary cycles in our environment. Images related to the energy of creation itself are generously formulated. Silhouettes of springs, mist or glaciers constitute a visual reminder of this creative energy. This is particularly true of the glacier, a feature, an “attribute” of nature that is a favored motif of Perner and symbolizes environmental cycles over broad expanses of time.
Natural cycles are a recurrent theme in Perner’s works; not the cycles per se, but rather how they are related to humankind’s perception of them in the here and now. Perner depicts major physical and metaphysical questions in his paintings: How does air come into being? Who or what is responsible for the generation of oxygen? How do trees grow? Where does the water cycle begin and end? Perner’s oil paintings strive to make our planet’s operating system tangible once more. This desire to help us comprehend the meaning of a natural cycle is intended to retrieve us from our new reality in virtual space and bring us back down to earth. His paintings ask these important questions through their visual aesthetics, and their goal is to provoke in us a fascination with nature. Nature is not just beauty, it is a force that is powerful, fair and indomitable. Perner fuses nature – often represented by glaciers – and mythology. Symbolically, he situates haptically tangible, natural giants and non-tangible mystic elements at the same level: the melting of glaciers acts as a symbol for the retreat of mysticism from our lives, from society. Perner sees this allegory as a romantic thought experiment.
The glaciers, along with all the natural shapes and features of the valleys, terraces and lakes they help to create, are a wonderful example of natural cycles and the mind-boggling expanses of time in which things happen on our planet. But they also show quite clearly the speed with which humankind is able to influence nature, which raises vital questions for the future: How will our water cycles, how will our alpine landscape be altered by the melting of glaciers? What kind of energy is set free by these events? How much damage are we inflicting on this natural reservoir through our habits? For Perner, the glacier stands as the perfect symbol of our carefree attitude to the superb concept called sustainability, an essential prerequisite for a viable and durable environment. Indeed, the glacier can very feasibly be regarded as a symbol of the onset and decline of the cycle of humankind itself. The energies that are set free in these natural changes represent an important source of inspiration for Perner’s creations. As the artist himself puts it, his paintings “should or can be shaped from this energy”.
Technique
[…] For Perner, it was the desire for transitions, the converging of colors and shapes that led him to oil paints. The fact that this is a natural material also contributed, as did the long drying time which allows the unhurried continuation of some previously commenced work at various levels and different color layers. In this way, Perner is able to continue shaping and working on these transitions, just as he sees them in his imagination; able too to begin this game with plasticity, or as he puts it “the haptics of his works”, this game with depth and versatility.
(Josef M. Winkler, works catalog SPHAIRA 2019)
The material color is perceived three-dimensionally, and hence different textures (from pastose to liquid glaze) affect the color value in different ways. Different shades of brown and gray define the color temperature of Perner’s paintings, but here and there an occasional area will be color accentuated. Sometimes the validity of a painting is short-lived and, even if once considered finished, it will be added to or modified in some way. This is a challenge that demands a deep resolve on the part of the artist, however it is a decision which the repainted picture will ultimately benefit from: something unexpected, an inspiration emerging from the moment, transforms the painting into a new entity that is nonetheless constructed on its underlying nature and remains dependent on it.
Nature is virtually the sole inspirational source for the motifs in Perner’s works. Quite often a work will be based on some photograph of nature, and then the motif will yield to the strokes of the brush, to the gesture, and to the feel of the surface. Defining his work as ‘abstract’ or ‘representational’ serves no purpose. Perner’s paintings define themselves by a narrative that reflects on natural energies and visualizes them from near and far.