String VIII (AP132015) Painting

A fantasy-paved road to reality - by Jan Vermeulen. Small, large formats and series alternate along the walls. One painting attracts more attention than the other. Sometimes screaming, fluorescent, then monotonous in tone. The empty bottles of turpentine and the many paint-stained polishing cloths indicate an almost maniacal worker. Several canvases are being worked at the same time. The amount of work in the studio betrays a potentially high productivity. Here it happens, in the nursery, here is sweated, toiled and thought. During his journey across the road, Mark Robert Peters walked numerous side roads. He carried out process-based research into content and technology, which resulted in a large diversity of work. From his academic time he struggles with an intrinsic interest in science and art, which often raise philosophical questions. His interest in the not immediately comprehensible subjects such as quantum mechanics, theory of relativity or string theory are therefore interesting, because it refers to the total being. From the atom to the universe, micro- and macrocosm, finite and infinite, but not tangible. Fiction or non-fiction, real or unreal, the intriguing contradictions makes you curious. In principle, Mark worked according to a concept, but as time progressed, a more intuitive approach followed. The phase of visualizing a concept can turn into a year-long process. Painting is a recurring discipline in his oeuvre in which the content has become subordinate to the image. He is guided more by atmosphere, which is determined by feeling, emotion and music. In all its shades and shapes, Peters' abstract works evoke numerous questions and feelings. They are not images that can be interpreted as one, two or three. Are they photorealistic paintings of new spatial dimensions, the universe or microscopic enlargements of viruses or scary diseases? It can also be landscapes from a science fiction film. It seems that various areas of interest of him comes together in these paintings. The viewer can go in many directions. He himself says that there is no story or concept behind the image. He wants to give people an experiential world, a mental space, in which people can stay and what gives peace. Why do pictures of the universe appeal to so many people? An interesting question because abstract paintings are generally less appreciated by the general public, while the photographs of the Hubble space telescope are actually just abstract images.