yellow purple blue in green white red and of course grey

PETER TOLLENS (*1954, Germany) seems to be laying open the practice of painting and the medium itself and it includes the sense of reveling color from within. His pictures have no literary approach, they do not want to tell a story. Rather, they are the processing of the impressions of the outside, from nature. Tollens sees nature as its greatest competitor and at the same time as his greatest source of inspiration. From a classic point of view, he is an impressionist who tries to store the impressions of the outside world as a mood. However, it is more than that: the pictures are coherent compositions that understand itself as individual and at the same time as a total work that has flows like a river through his work since the 1970s. In the pictures, the individual brush strokes stand as individuals and are a mass, a meeting of individuals, a society of color and meaning in their entirety. They are fluid like sounds and hikes through the picture, from the outside to the inside and from the inside out. Above all, the works of Peter Tollens are always directed forward. They clearly address the viewer, the opposite. He decidedly uses the medium canvas as a three-dimensional space and builds with its brush strokes and color application for color application, layer by layer on it. The pictures are never flat, but always developing forward. Peter Tollens sets his own ego aside in the process of the painting’s creation. Because the paintings often develop a life of their own, he says, whom it takes to pursue, which he is subject to as a painter, on which he no longer decides which twists the picturesque process are received. (Elisa Mosch, 2023)