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Dr. Petra Roettig

Text for the exhibition “Lichtgeflutet” (Flooded with Light), 2025, at Felix Jud, Hamburg

White spray lashes over black rocks, bright rays of sun break through the dark thicket of a forest, a rooster proudly lifts its magnificent plumage: in their precise rendering, Peter Wels’s pictures seem to reproduce situations and places familiar to us, and with them an image of reality. They are pictures that overwhelm us through their exactness, through their interplay of light and shadow, and from which, at the same time, a great stillness emanates. At first glance one assumes one is looking at a photograph. Only on closer inspection does it become apparent that these high-contrast black-and-white images are drawn.

“Drawing is seeing” – the well-known dictum about the significance and representational power of drawing applies to Peter Wels with particular force. Trained as an architect who for many years produced design drawings for large-scale projects at international architecture firms, he was always guided first and foremost by the precise idea and by seeing how something might be. The same is true of his free drawings, which he has been making since 2005. Yet these are less about concrete spaces than about open moments. We truly believe we know these places and instants, and yet they do not really exist. From fragments of his own and other people’s photographs, Peter Wels creates – initially on the computer – pictorial compositions whose suggestive power fascinates and draws us in while at the same time astonishing us. Can something really be drawn so faithfully to reality? With deceptive verisimilitude, the crests of foam bead off the cliffs of a bay, and the shimmering reflections of light are rendered in the shadowy forest, in the plumage of hens or in the interior of a dark cathedral. Drawn first in charcoal and later mainly with wax-based pencils, these seemingly concrete images radiate something enigmatic. Unlike Robert Longo’s hyperrealist charcoal drawings, for instance, they open up places that leave the viewer room for their own imagination. Through hatching, smudging and the contrast of white and black forms, Peter Wels creates suggestive image worlds of great power and energy. Single blades of grass, bright leaves, blazing light – and crests of foam stand out: effects that arise solely from blank spaces left in the paper or from erasure. Look more closely and you increasingly see abstract structures within the drawing that unmask its supposed realism. Is our sense of reality shaped by abstraction? The atmospheric juxtaposition of precision and blur, of the definite and the indeterminate, has a tradition in photography and painting, serving to create subtle “in-between spaces”. In some of Peter Wels’s drawings this blur becomes the defining theme. We perceive nature only hazily and feel all the more drawn to it. A mysterious calm emanates from these pictures. “It is the stillness and, at the same time, the openness that conveys the feeling of eternity,” says the artist. These are drawn masterpieces of harmony and clear beauty that enchant and inspire our imagination.

Petra Roettig