“Pampas de Sacramento” by Peter Stoffel brings together all the mountain landscapes that the Geneva artist painted in 2003. The volume is supplemented with a text by Bernd Ruzicska, who develops a precise, associative narrative about the perception of landscape parallel to the pictures.
Stoffel found his approximately 30 motifs all over the world: from Fälenalp and Guruve to the Pampas de Sacramento and the Dachstein Group. The relatively small canvas panels convey images of places we think we know because they follow an apparently traditional pictorial structure. But in his painting Stoffel dissolves the landscapes in a collage-like manner, fragments the information, reassembles it anew and thus turns the surface of the earth into a huge patchwork. From a distance we recognize the mountain peaks and flanks, the valleys and depressions. But the closer we look at the pictures, the more irrevocably the landscape disintegrates before our eyes. Stoffel's views are headscapes sampled from colour and form and imagination.
In his text on the work of Peter Stoffel, Bernd Ruzicska writes: A mountain claims a landscape. Calm, firm and sublime. But periodically, through the ages, the land varies and changes shape and appearance. Measured against time, the mountain is not permanent.