‘After building a remarkable oeuvre as a sculptor, Peter Weidenbaum turned to painting, a medium he had originally studied at the Academy in Antwerp. His sculpture shows an immediate link with the surrealist tradition: wedges driven into a head, fingers crawling out like worms. This is less obvious in his painting, but his wish to record unconscious processes is no less strong. On the contrary: one could argue that a work is all the more surreal when it goes unnoticed and appears realistic. His work is mysteriously symbolic, a frequent feature of contemporary painting. Things are not what they seem; the more ordinary, the stranger.
Weidenbaum reflects on the world around him. First on the paint marks on trees, an international code that few understand. Then he looks down from towers, which creates a peculiar perspective. Then he takes us into the forest – not a pleasant walk in nature, but haunting angles that confuse our view. Then to the big city, where streets, squares and monuments look like pictures in a tourist guide, until, looking closely, we recognise the social power relations that rule the city. The city and its modern armour, the car, are inseparable images. When roads cross unexpectedly, it takes little knowledge of statistics to predict the crash. The accident carries chance in its very name; an accident that changes lives is a surreal experience in any case.
Weidenbaum also sees this strangeness of the everyday in the media. Who are the reporters? What are they talking about? What reality do they show us? He is concerned with these necessary falsifications of reality, and uses an impressionistic technique for it. Up close, his paintings look like abstract patches of colour; from a distance a reality blossoms, always with the emphasis on the momentary, the changeable, the insidious. Life itself.’
— Willem Elias
