PEBE Paul Bader remains, within his generation and in the region of southwestern Germany, an artist who has asserted himself as a painter and draftsman and whose work is distinguished by its unique character. The work of PEBE is conditioned by an attentive look at its environment and an intense dialogue with its fellows. Man, alone or in a group, both indoors and in urban areas, is his inexhaustible subject. The interior and exterior of the contemporary human world is at the center of his concerns. In this figurative style is reflected the state of mind of the time.
“My art is the study of contemporary Man in his current world, in an expressive and often surreal realism. »
"I see in my paintings a synthesis between the 'real' and the abstract", the 'given' and the 'created', a 'process', a vision that characterizes our time".
PEBE thus paid homage to man: to man standing and moving, striking a pose or letting himself go in a moment of inattention, brooding or floating on ice skates, letting himself go daydreaming or dancing to jazz music. PEBE explores a wide range of creative possibilities. As varied as the approaches are, all the works have one thing in common: none is locked into unimaginative realism or slavish naturalism. Something magical and infinite emanates from it, a spirit freed from any obstacle to the ambition of imitation.
Through a reflection on the strength of linearity and a redefinition of figurativeness in the sense of elementary simplification, he also incorporates characteristics of the naïve. The reinvented character at the same time articulates space, thus freed from the use of perspective.
PEBE varies both physically and physiognomically, and thus achieves determinations making him recognizable as an individual artist.
The artist does not draw the portrait of specific people, but uses typical characters who appear in his paintings under multiple appearances. There is the character from the back, the one from the front, the walker.
The secret poetry is manifest. In Paul Bader's color tones, dreams and hopes have crept in and determine the color temperature of the paintings, which turns neither cold nor dull.
The figures - the painter speaks of "Diktatfiguren" - are characterized by a unique abstraction, which can be considered characteristic of his artistic style.
The experiences of cubism, surrealism, new objectivity are reflected in his work, as are those of "automatic writing" and postmodernism.
PEBE defines itself as caught in the great real. It is a realism that appropriates in a casual and sovereign way the means of expression of surrealism and especially of expressionism.
“Painting goes further than the painter. I see it as a service rendered to generations. She knows how to decipher and interpret life, existence and time. You can express many things with painting and drawing: criticize man, society, God and the world, denounce, protest, provoke.
For my part, I want to offer a new look at everyday life, apparently banal, the obvious, behind which lie the "miracles", to free it from being buried by stress, habit, indifference and to pursue the search for sensations and qualities of life that we thought were lost.
I am in search of spaces of freedom, qualities of life that we believe almost lost in a world of smog, agitation and non-contemplation... an art where poetry, fascination and the magic still exists, even the optimism, the joy of living".
