Peter Piller, to be touched from afar. In collaboration with German Academy Rome Villa Massimo

The exhibition to be touched from afar brings together a small selection of works from the project Geröll with a large-format image taken from the series Behind Time—displayed outside the bookstore on the black wall of the former L’Angolo di Franca bar.  Behind Time is also the new volume in the series Archiv Peter Piller– Materialien, subtitled On the potential of futile endeavours, published by Nieves in collaboration with Leporello Books and the German Academy Rome Villa Massimo.

During the exhibition opening, there will also be a reading in German of Peter Piller’s text nach auflösung örtlicher frühnebel, a piece related to Behind Time. The text will be available in a fold-out format for the duration of the exhibition, along with English and Italian translations, together with the display of a selection of the artist’s many publications.

On the walls of Leporello, ancient inscriptions, archaeological finds, mysterious caves, and rocks—which may not actually be rocks—draw attention to an archaic world steeped in an indefinable animism: a selection from research on prehistoric art, and part of the broader Geröll project, which brings together—maintaining a constant balance between scientific approach and pure visual associations—images gathered from books and newspapers, as well as created by the artist, that speak to the presence of the Stone Age in his everyday life.

In geology, the term Geröll refers to accumulations of rock fragments, pebbles, or stones, often formed by the action of rivers or glaciers, and so here we see fragments that invite both contemplation and attempts at decipherment, in a game of conjecture and misunderstanding, of hypotheses that immediately give way to a renewed desire for discovery, and that trigger a dialogue with a surreal flavor with the project Behind Time, crossing space and time in the spirit of a missed encounter.

The subject of this latter series is Peter Piller’s unique approach to ornithological photography, a passion the artist has held since his youth, which gradually shifts from an obsession with capturing the most diverse species of birds in their most precise form to those very moments when they elude the lens, slipping out of the frame and thus once again opening up a perspective on the ever-present possibility of meaning slipping away, through associations inspired by a poetics of error and opacity, fueled by a constantly evolving interplay of reclassification and recontextualization.

As if guided by an errant spirit—one that evokes, in contemporary forms, the spirit of the aimless wanderer who makes wandering itself his horizon—we no longer ask ourselves what we are looking at, nor do we try to grasp it—either with our eyes or with our reason—but we allow ourselves to be captivated by what appears through these ever-changing relationships between images: a sort of an updated and somewhat surreal take on the traditional Etruscan and Roman divination practices that attempt to read the signs of the sky and the earth and the flight of birds, but without drawing any interpretations or conclusions from them; rather, it involves savoring the time of waiting and what—despite all the signs and symbols—is right there, before our eyes and all around us.

Peter Piller lives in Hamburg. He studied fine arts, art education, German language and literature, and geography. The Archiv Peter Piller collects photographs from various sources and presents them organized into thematic series. His artistic practice also includes photography, drawing, moments of waiting, and walks. From 2006 to 2018, he taught photography in the field of contemporary art at the HGBK Leipzig (Leipzig Academy of Fine Arts), and since October 2018, he has been a professor in the visual arts department at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf (Düsseldorf Academy of Fine Arts).