Peter Rothmeier Ravns exhibition "Paintings" consists partly of works from this summer's exhibition "The Fall" at the Rudolph Tegners Museum, and a series of new oil paintings from recent months. The works from "The Fall" were created following an invitation from the museum to enter into a dialogue with the sculptor Rudolph Tegner (1873-1950). They constitute Ravn's answer to and corrective to Tegner's depictions of the ideal masculinity in eternal vitalistic upward striving and control.
In the latest works, Ravn picks up the thread from his exhibition at KANT, The Free Movement in 2021. Here he transplants his men - Ravn's signature - into forest-like surroundings. With danger and redemption as inseparable core forces, Ravn has been inspired by the American author and advocate of civil disobedience Henry David Thoreau as well as by newer trends such as eco-poetry and, climate fiction.
"I have been interested in investigating a new reality, where nature and man are connected for better and for worse, without the usual hierarchies," says Peter Ravn.
The new works show a renewal in the color balance. The color pink recurs in many of Ravn's works from recent years. In a close match with the unmistakable signature color green, of which we are presented with almost endless variants from the faintest tone of the color above the loden color - for example in his woolly three-dimensional works - to a sharp and juicy grass green. So far, shades of red have most often appeared in connection with the painting of Ravn's formidable descriptions of hands, faces, and shoe soles. But now color is assigned the main role as a mood marker. A sweetness, a light from something that seems unnatural or supernatural sunset, is a fusion of skin and nature.
The flexibility of the ambiguous; the enigmatic and sometimes playful is still characteristic of the artist. The dismantling of the existing world order with hints of possible new worlds and forms of coexistence lies as a refined undercurrent in the individual works.
