Being the center of their own universe these shop signs are always the same: a rectangle with a big T and the words »Sali e Tabacchi, the literal translation for salt and tobacco. This project was started in Rome 2022 because of the beautiful and charming signs all over the city. Created out of an accumulation of material, acrylics, oil paint, pigments, fabrics and pigment prints, these canvases seem to float between figuration (words) and abstraction. The image is literally brought to surface through calculated action as different varnishes become thicker and more complex, trapping metallic pigments like gold, silver and copper. The use of different varnishes and UV coatings, together with oil paint, absorb, reflect and diffuse light and enhances the capacity of the surface, creating a depth of pictorial spac
Peter Vahlefeld – Sali e Tabacchi (Rom) – Galerie Michael Heufelder
The essence of Camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration. And Camp is something of a private code, a badge of identity. To talk about Camp is therefore to betray it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmfNot62fYk&feature=youtu.be
www.first-as-tragedy-then-as-farce.com/berlin/peter-vahlefeld/malerei/
Peter Vahlefeld – Sali e Tabacchi (Rom) – Galerie Michael Heufelder
To start very generally: Camp is a certain mode of aestheticism. It is one way of seeing the world as an aesthetic phenomenon. That way, the way of Camp, is not in terms of beauty, but in terms of the degree of artifice, of stylization.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFDwdSulpqM&feature=youtu.be
www.stabyartprojects.de/vahlefeld.html
Peter Vahlefeld – Sali e Tabacchi (Rom) – Galerie Michael Heufelder
Camp is a vision of the world in terms of style – but a particular kind of style. It is the love of the exaggerated, the »off«, of things-being-what-they-are-not.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SqRKC5l-jjI&feature=youtu.be
www.muenchner-galerien.de/ausstellung/jan-kuck-peter-vahlefeld/
Peter Vahlefeld – Sali e Tabacchi (Rom) – Galerie Michael Heufelder
To perceive Camp in objects and persons is to understand Being-as-Playing-a-Role. It is the farthest extension, in sensibility, of the metaphor of life as theater.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U06iR3WdIQs&feature=youtu.be
www.newandabstract.com/blogs/news/five-questions-to-peter-vahlefeld
Peter Vahlefeld – Sali e Tabacchi (Rom) – Galerie Michael Heufelder
Perhaps, though, it is not so much a question of the unintended effect versus the conscious intention, as of the delicate relation between parody and self-parody.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UoaAnXeWKtU&feature=youtu.be
www.singulart.com/de/blog/2021/07/27/5-minuten-mit-peter-vahlefeld/
Peter Vahlefeld – Sali e Tabacchi (Rom) – Galerie Michael Heufelder
Things are Camp when we become less involved in them, and can enjoy, instead of be frustrated by, the failure of the attempt.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSpQ5leM8Wc&feature=youtu.be
www.peter-vahlefeld.de/
Peter Vahlefeld – Sali e Tabacchi (Rom) – Galerie Michael Heufelder
Camp is the sensibility of failed seriousness, of the theatricalization of experience. The sensibility of high culture is basically moralistic. Camp is consistently aesthetic experience of the world. It incarnates a victory of style over content, aesthetics over morality, of irony over tragedy. Camp and tragedy are antithesis, is camping.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_S5Hd6u8Mo&feature=youtu.be
www.issuu.com/vahlefeld
Peter Vahlefeld – Sali e Tabacchi (Rom) – Galerie Michael Heufelder
The only criterion of an act is its elegance. Elegance is the quality of conduct which transforms the greatest amount of being into appearing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zzBseEFp2VM&feature=youtu.be
www.ichweissnichtwaseinortistichkennenurseinenpreis.de/
Peter Vahlefeld – Sali e Tabacchi (Rom) – Galerie Michael Heufelder
Camp is playful, anti-serious. One is drawn to camp when one realizes that sincerity is not enough. Sincerity can be simple philistinism, intellectual narrowness.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpNphUF7eIU&feature=youtu.be
www.travelogue-petervahlefeld.com/artbaselmiamibeach/
Peter Vahlefeld – Sali e Tabacchi (Rom) – Galerie Michael Heufelder
The whole point of Camp is to dethrone the serious. Sincerity is not enough. Sincerity can be simple philistinism, intellectual narrowness. The traditional means for going beyond straight seriousness – irony, satire – seem feeble today, inadequate to the culturally oversaturated medium in which contemporary sensibility is schooled.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lkBK5RPUm8&feature=youtu.be
www.travelogue-petervahlefeld.com/artbaselhongkong/
Peter Vahlefeld – Sali e Tabacchi (Rom) – Galerie Michael Heufelder
Camp taste is, above all, a mode of enjoyment, of appreciation – not judgement. Camp is generous. It wants to enjoy. Camp taste identifies with what it is enjoying.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LaItemF5mv0&feature=youtu.be
www.vahlefeld-painting.com/
Peter Vahlefeld – Sali e Tabacchi (Rom) – Galerie Michael Heufelder
According to this diagnosis, any intelligent and articulate modern person is likely to inhabit one culture to the exclusion of the other. Camp versus Camping. It is culture or it just promotes culture. The most interesting and creative art of our time is not open to the generally educated; it demands special effort; it speaks a specialized language; it demands an education of sensibility whose difficulties and length of apprenticeship are at least comparable to the difficulties of mastering physics or engineering. The most interesting works of contemporary art are full of references to the history of the medium; so far as they comment on past art, they demand a knowledge of at least the recent past. As Harold Rosenberg has pointed out, contemporary paintings are themselves acts of criticism as much as of creation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_k2MhsXokpg&feature=youtu.be
www.linkedin.com/posts/jan-kuck-323a4212_sehr-happy-%C3%BCber-die-gemeinsame-ausstellung-activity-7079924672925945857-NSD5
Peter Vahlefeld – Sali e Tabacchi (Rom) – Galerie Michael Heufelder
What we are witnessing is not so much a conflict of cultures as the creation of a new kind of sensibility. This new sensibility is rooted in our experience, experiences which are new in the history of humanity – in extreme social and physical mobility; in the crowdedness of the human scene (both people and material commodities multiplying at a dizzying rate); in the availability of new sensations such as speed; and in the pan-cultural perspective on the arts that is possible through the mass reproduction of art objects. What we are getting is not the demise of art, but a transformation of the function of art. Art, which arose in human society as a magical-religious operation, and passed over into a technique for depicting and commenting on secular reality, has in our own time arrogated to itself a new function. All kinds of conventionally accepted boundaries have to be challenged, also many established distinctions within the world of culture itself – that between form and content, the frivolous and the serious, and high and low culture. They are changing the ground rules which most of us employ to recognize a work of art.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N66g-DNjPms&feature=youtu.be
www.der-zerbrochene-spiegel.de/berlin/malerei/peter-vahlefeld/
Peter Vahlefeld – Sali e Tabacchi (Rom) – Galerie Michael Heufelderg
Typically, it is only certain artists in any given era who have the resources and temerity to live in immediate contact with the environment of their age. That is why they may seem to be »ahead of their time«. More timid people prefer to accept the previous environment’s values as the continuing reality of their time. The Matthew Arnold notion of culture defines art as the criticism of life – this being understood as the propounding of moral, social and political ideas. The new sensibility understands art as the extension of life – this being understood as the representation of new modes of vivacity. If art is understood as a form of discipline of the feelings and a programming of sensations, then the feeling given off by a Rauschenberg painting might be like that of a song by the Supremes or the Dandy Warhols.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BaqXVzExls&feature=youtu.be
www.besteht-das-deutsche-feuilleton-nur-noch-aus-todesanzeigen.de/kunst/malerei/berlin/petervahlefeld/
