A gentleman decked out with an elegant suit removes each and every object from a stylish business-class hotel room and puts them in a suitcase. The same man, this time in a dressing gown, white shirt, bow tie, and tuxedo shoes, appears for a tie-breaker on a large green tennis court inside the Semper Depot in Vienna.

In Spannungsunterbrechung (Suspense Suspended), as is so often the case with Peter Dressler’s works, the artist is in the center of poetic observation as the sole actor in spaces dominating the scenery. In his conceptual works, the issue for the photographer is neither the self-infatuated parading of different aspects of his personality nor the acting out of emotional states. Peter Dressler loved describing events and dissecting human behaviors. So he became his own actor first of all, and, for pragmatic reasons, the person closest to him.

Peter Dressler described his photographs as film stills which had the advantage of offering themselves for detailed inspection. This is where the originality and the special type of humor unfolded from: the arrested story, which would have been too brief for film or literature, in photography defines a time form in which the moment is bracketed in between the before and the after and, lifted out of the freeze frame, taken to the point of bizarrerie and absurdity. Thus – in images that are not moving, let alone fleeting – neuroses of everydayness and exaggerated forms of appropriation emerge. Dressler’s pictorial inventions have a pleasant slowness about them and are enactments, for example in “Tie Break” – a self-duel –, of the self-reference and melancholy of modern man incarcerated behind the walls of his or her self.

Text: Angela Stief