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Illegible Pictures
Stephan Berg


Land­scapes that could only exist in art spread into the twi­light under blue and white skies. Pic­ture­sque ruins stand washed by the sea, or sit amid ver­dant, fairy­tale scenes ashimmer with tur­quoise lakes. There are rocket silos, battle­ships and sub­ma­rines but, in­ter­est­ing­ly, their bel­li­cose sig­nif­i­cance nev­er punc­tures these mag­ic, noc­tur­nal idylls. Beached like a great whale, the mot­tled sub­ma­rine rests in the shal­lows of a spark­ling ex­panse of water, blend­ing rath­er than con­trast­ing with the land­scape. The rockets on their launch ramp also look fos­sil­iz­ed, a sculp­tur­al sym­bol of a shot never to be fired. Peter Duka’s land­scapes nearly al­ways pan an ex­treme­ly broad, hori­zont­al sweep, toy­ing with pa­ra­dox­es, puz­zles and un­fath­om­able se­crets. They sus­tain the no­tion of the pic­ture as the locus of a se­ri­ous aes­thet­ic ex­pe­ri­ence. Such ex­pe­ri­ence can­not be grasp­ed in the prag­mat­ic, plus-or-minus terms of ac­tual cal­cu­la­tion. It is in­cal­cu­la­ble and must, by na­ture, re­main uto­pian.
 In es­sence, of course, this is a ro­man­tic pro­ject: one that speaks of vi­su­al and other yearn­ings, of de­sire pe­ren­ni­al­ly un­ful­filled. Thus the land­scaped gar­dens of the 18th and 19th cen­turies serve as foun­da­tions for Duka’s work, as they rep­re­sent a de­mon­stra­ble “hot seam” be­tween image and re­al­i­ty. Paint­ings in­flu­enced the land­scape and garden de­signs of the period; sub­se­quent­ly, the land­scapes and gar­dens cre­at­ed ac­cord­ing to these de­signs be­came the sub­jects of other paint­ings. In other words, it is here, as no­where else, that the pic­ture re­al­izes its pri­mor­di­al long­ing for a world shaped in its own image. Peter Duka and his long-standing ar­tis­tic part­ner Caro­line Bitter­mann deal with this theme in their pro­ject, “Die Dritte Kam­mer” (The Third Cham­ber), which they start­ed in 1995. Their idea be­comes re­al­i­ty in the spa­cious “Se­cret Gar­dens of Rolands­werth” at the ARP MUSEUM, Rolands­eck Sta­tion. As a “walk-in pic­ture,” this gar­den has be­come an ideal place for re­view­ing the re­al­i­ty of pic­tures and the pic­to­ri­al na­ture of re­al­ity.
 However, a complex set of met­a­phors is al­ways at work in these paint­ings. Its pur­pose is to de­vise ideas and con­cepts as plas­tic con­structs which, de­spite their pur­port­ed tan­gi­bil­i­ty, re­main opaque and im­pe­ne­tra­ble. The ruins are al­ways frag­men­tary and frag­ile, un­der­lin­ing more than the con­triv­ed, con­struct­ed, ar­ti­fi­cial as­pects of these sce­nar­ios. The con­stant re­com­po­si­tion of iden­ti­cal or sim­i­lar ar­chi­tec­tur­al fea­tures in­to sur­re­al, hy­brid ar­chi­tec­ture also makes it clear how far Duka’s build­ings are ac­tual­ly con­structs of ideas. They are tex­tures, whose ho­ri­zon ranges from the crum­bling re­mains of a failed mod­ern­ism to No­va­lis, and finds its ful­fil­ment in the claim, made in his 1789 “Notes for a Ro­man­tic En­cy­clo­pae­dia,” that “the ac­com­plish­ed spe­cu­la­tion leads back to na­ture.” Sus­pend­ed over­head are lu­mi­nous, orange-red ba­roque scrolls, fro­zen in form and com­plete­ly with­out text. This makes sense, be­cause the pic­tures them­selves are the text. And they can only un­fold their ima­gi­na­tive power by re­main­ing il­leg­i­ble.