City Horizons as Fiction

The city views by the painter Peter Ruehle are stretched into sheer, endless panoramas. Painted to perfection, buildings are strung together along the horizon. As with a film strip, the viewer is led along the city silhouettes of European metropolises. New York, Vienna, Venice, Rome, Florence, Paris, or Berlin seen from a new, unknown perspective. Well-known buildings and monuments are at first recognizable, but at second glance one discovers the synthesis between fiction and reality.

With a meticulous stroke of the brush, the artist develops a broad spectrum of urbanity. His paintings are a vision of the present and future, the familiar and unknown. Magnificent, museum-like buildings are complemented with unknown doors, domes, and towers. Within a moment, a seemingly unidentifiable city becomes a universal interplay of cosmopolitan flair.

The usual genre of historical city veduta, which comes as close to reality as possible, is contrasted with the fantasy of the viewer and showcased by Peter Ruehle as a city model from an unique perspective. Bit by bit, the eye begins to scan what it cannot locate and identify. In atmospherically-loaded nuances of color, Peter Ruehle paints small strips, one after the other, on which the buildings are stretched across broadly rather than staggered behind each other. Without a distinct foundation, a flowing ideal perspective expands before our eyes.

Dynamics and change dominate the aesthetic: a synthesis of the modern city. From a network of global, urban ideas, he extracts his own angular perspective on urban silhouettes. In the end, a new characteristic of a city in awakening develops; recognizable but also transformed.

Christina Wendenburg