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PFELDER (Hamburg, 1965)

„World Receivers and Reality Amplifiers
Anyone who, like Pfelder, has worked for ten years in the zone where art and reality interpenetrate must have distanced themselves knowingly and willingly from the traditional image of the artist. For what Pfelder takes as his strategic model is not the creative hero who introduces his quasi-divine works into a bleak world with the aim of purifying it, but rather the far more reflexive status of the productive observer, from which he derives precise analyses of local situations, narrative contexts or mental spaces, and through which he presents conclusions relevant to the viewer in the form of economical interventions. He is therefore someone who acknowledges the force of actual states of affairs, which he knows how to outwit by exposing for brief but decisive moments the latent possibilities in what is already available. He is also someone who gently negates the topos of absolute designs that claim universal indispensability and strive for autonomy and originality, and who responds instead to what circumstances offer. It is not the world that requires further alteration (an ambition pursued more extensively and reliably by others, and which always ends in disaster), but at most our perceptions of seemingly familiar phenomena within the urban environment, everyday routines or expectations relating to the landscape. In this considered retreat into small gestures and unprogrammatic exemplification, Pfelder finds his specific answer to such widespread conditions as the loss of utopia, crises of meaning, market forces and the pursuit of career; by means of his precise operations he retains, moreover, his ability to act and to reach into the respective physical space from the relevant perspective.“