“Een weeë glimlach en weke knieën bij zo veel lieflijkheid”, Arjan Reinders, Het Parool, July 8 – 2002
Translation by Rune Peitersen

“…The Danish born [Rune] Peitersen has been experimenting with amorpheous fleshcoloured shapes since he was at the academy in The Hague. On early paintings he let reddish paint stream over the canvas as slowly coagulating blood. Later he created three-dimensional works with the aid of quickfoam, a dirty material which continues to slowly grow for hours, after being applied. Eventually he, as so many others, started manipulating images of body parts using a computer. In his works this results in images of weird lumps of flesh. Horrific chunks of flesh which reminds one of abortions or primitive lifeforms from a distant planet. The latter led Peitersen to add a very threatening aspect to photos of everyday reality. With his digital brush he painted flesh-like shapes at the banks of an idyllic river, suggesting pending doom. In the gallery a similar work is displayed. A photo of an apparently harmless interior, a TV showing a shampoo commercial and next to bunches of grapes. Here the everyday image is cruelly disturbed by an enormous corporeal mass which seems to be growing out of a laundry basket. Fierce as these works may be, the real horrors are to be found in Peitersen’s darker photos and video’s of love-making couples. From the internet he collected some pornographic photos which he distorted to a degree that it’s hard to tell anymore that this was once two bodies. The human figures have literally melted together. In the videos these undefined bodily shapes even move to a pulsing rythm, resembling most of all a large beating organ. Although it turns your stomach inside out and the aesthetics are a lot less responsible, Peitersen’s fantasy images are far more intriguing than Regnerus’ poetry-album pictures. Where her pseudo-interesting pictorial findings suckles you into a comatose sleep, Peitersen’s bizarre retardations provide ample stimulation to look at reality with a widely awakened gaze.”

Arjan Reinders

Rune Peitersen