Since art and money go together like peanut butter and jelly, Peter Vahlefeld´s new paintings are the perfect metaphor for our twenty-first-century. As the English critic John Berger first argued in »Ways of Seeing«, oil painting as we know it is innately materialistic. The paint is a kind of material and when it is applied to canvas the result is an image that is essentially a kind of property that can be bought, traded, and moved from place to place. Works of art in a capitalist culture inevitably are reduced to the condition of commodity. What Peter Vahlefeld does is to short-circuit the process and start with the commodity—he over-paints advertisements for international galleries, museums, auction houses, and museum shop merchandising that form the base of his paintings.
