Mirrors
and
Windows
Exhibition by Fee Pétrus 2023
curated by Marc De Tollenaere
at the dentistry practice
Dr. Tilo Bartels and Colleagues
Theatinerstraße 47 (4th floor), 80333 Munich
Venice – a new dimension
Many may wonder why an exhibition in Munich is curated by an artist from Venice.
First of all, the obvious: Some of the pictures shown here were taken in Venice and reflect a mysterious side of this city in the lagoon.
Venice is the place,where Susanne Bartels, alias Fee Pétrus, became a picture storyteller.
A far-reaching change took place in the history of Venetian figurative art in the second half of the 15th century: the Byzantine style was revolutionized by the influence of the Florentine school. This meant the transition from the two-dimensional image icon, without a spatial impression, to the image with spatial perspective, in which a story could finally be told in one image.
The photos of Fee Pétrus from the previous exhibition also resembled icons, consisting of a subject with a background.
The transformation that can be seen in her pictures in the current exhibition is like a transition into a new dimension - a whole world is revealed in every photo.
Venice has always been a meeting place for peoples from all parts of Europe, the Mediterranean and the Adriatic and has therefore emerged from a mixture of different cultures. It is to this fact that Venice owes its face as a city of art and culture, for which it is admired and appreciated by everyone.
What was immediately revealed to me in Fee Pétrus's pictures is a mixture of peoples, religions and traditions that are connected by a common thread. The exhibition is developed along this formal context; the images can be read as individual images, but also in combination as diptychs or triptychs.
In both cases, the special mixture has created a treasure that deals with the major themes of humanity, art, life and death, light and shadow. Through a crack in the window, the artist offers a view of her mirror of symbols, joy and sadness, love and humor, transience, reality and fiction.
I took on the challenge and responsibility of curating and presenting this exhibition with great pleasure!
Marc De Tollenaere
Welcome on my stage
My imagination: “The Purple Rose of Cairo” by Woody Allen – Baxter emerges from the film into reality. In my script, however, the direction is reversed.
The actors step into my camera and my story; out of the three-dimensional, colorful, loud reality and onto the lustful, nostalgic two-dimensional black and white 28mm stage of my camera. The lights, the props, the costumes, the identities - all already assembled and composed - combine to form a spontaneous theater, a narrative in just one image. The image is a Janus creature between reality and appearance and stimulates the imagination and dreams. Every picture is always a reflection of the photographer - a framed view, captured time.
On the large like on the small stage, the viewer wants to be touched - by the great drama, by the comedy, by the overwhelming, by the mysterious stranger, by the beautiful and by the ugly.
I feel the longing for this touch, my own and that of others. It is the beginning of everything, it drives us.
I see everything in my own colors, the infinite gradations between black and white.
Welcome to my stage!
Take a careful look into other people's mirrors.
