Opening of Peter Elkan: City Scapes
Ladies and gentlemen,
To begin with, let me mention a few names: Canaletto, Vermeer, L. S. Lowry, Fejes Emerich, Claude Monet, David Hepher, Giuseppe Zocchi, Utagawa Hiroshige, Peter Elkan, surely there are many more. What do they have in common? And I will answer this question taking into account all of Peter Elkan’s periods.
You see, there are visual artists who are in search of newness and new horizons, understanding by horizons new geographical areas, other visual spectacles. But there are also visual artists who choose fidelity. Fidelity to a city, to a certain light, to an emotion, open areas to new visual and theoretical approaches. These are subjects that are never exhausted. In this case I stop at the painters already mentioned: Canaletto for Venice, Vermeer for Delft, Lowry for Salford/Manchester/England, Fejes for Belgrade and Venice, Monet for Paris, David Hepher – London, Zocchi – Florence, Utagawa Hiroshige – Tokyo during the Edo period.
Peter Elkan belongs to this second category, as rare as it is precious. His personal exhibitions bear witness to this (The Contemporary Old Man 1 and 2), Sequences, Midnight Colours…) and the group exhibitions (Contemporary Art, 2012, The Summer Game (2014)).
All his works are dedicated to Cluj. Not to a monumental or ostentatious Cluj, but to an inner, emotional Cluj, intensely lived and with patience, with tenderness why not. It is, I have also noticed this, a Cluj of details that most often escape hurried glances. How the reflections on the pavement after rain escape, the silences between buildings, the discreetly lit windows, street corners that preserve the traces of time, how statues, busts escape, through negligence or not…
One more thing must be emphasized, an important one as well. Peter Elkan is faithful to Cluj. He is also faithful to watercolor, the most fragile and sincere among techniques. Because watercolor does not allow excess, it does not hide hesitation, it cannot be forced. Everything takes place in a delicate balance between water, pigment and pictorial gesture. And in Peter Elkan’s hands, this fragility becomes poetic strength.
The city breathes differently. Thanks to Peter Elkan we can recover, even if only for a few moments, the capacity to contemplate. In this lies in fact the profound beauty of this exhibition City Scapes, the rendering of the city we know.
In an artistic world more attracted by spectacle and the ephemeral, the consistency with which Peter Elkan dedicates his work to Cluj is something moral. It is a gesture of memory, of belonging and of openly manifested love. Rare things, very rarely encountered.
City Scapes is not an exhibition about a city. It is the exhibition about the way in which a city becomes artistic destiny.
I invite you to walk through these watercolors as through a quieter, sensitive, real Cluj, more real than the Cluj we cross day by day.
Demostene Șofron
