"Círsium vulgáre (Wollkopf-Kratzdistel)"

pigmentbased inkjet print

Peter Mathis loves distance. He pairs direct experience with the analytical gaze of observation. He seeks eternal validity in the spontaneous moment, and he turns time into timelessness.
Having grown up in the Alps, he is familiar with the world of mountains. Their magnificence is both fascinating and challenging. Ascending and coming down, with shoes, skies or with a rope and hooks, is part of life in the mountains. Mathis has accepted the athletic challenges and mastered them, and he has explored heights and regions that are only accessible to very few people.
The photographer has a keen and attentive eye for nature and landscapes. He photographs mountains in their changing appearance, depending on the weather, close up and immediate. It is as if he wanted to make clear that he and his camera feel as much part of the mountains as the animals and plants living there. When everything is in harmony, humans, flora, fauna, and the rock, then the world is intact.
For the past two years, Mathis has devoted himself to alpine flowers, which sometimes required long trips into the mountains. By the time he had brought these flowers to his studio, they had already withered. In order to remedy this, he installed a mobile photo studio on site – an approach that is similar to a scientist who wants to capture his objects as close to nature and as unchanged as possible. The never-changing white background before which he photographs the plants, and the Latin names, make Peter Mathis appear as a naturalist. On the one hand, he is precisely that because he documents what he finds, but on the other hand, the plants are showcased because of their beauty. In these photographs, lines and forms appear as if they had been drawn, and every detail, and how it contributes to the overall appearance, becomes visible.
(Galerie Susanne Albrecht, Berlin)