Whether King Minos, Daedalus, the labyrinth of the Minotaur, Knossos, Phaistos or Gortyn, hardly no other country in the world has such interesting early cultural history as the island of Crete. Myths laden terms encounter one step by step, and if one lives and works on the island like me, it is impossible not to come into contact with them.Whether you want or not, you will almost caught by them.

The Lyra Sings, Dances, and Laughs

Crete, the island is full of alluring themes, the past can not do without the present, and the present without the past. In my studio in the village Plora at the edge of the Messara I can let myself fall into the marvelous light of the Aegean. Light that consumes the shadows, a game for an artist from the north, a feast every day. The colors become gorgeous and are ready to be taken like a good meal, served on the canvas in a thousand facets. My paintings become softer and finer by the light here.

It is a good state to be able to live among neighbors which reap their fruits just like me with their hands work. Life here still has original qualitiy that gives me back the groundeness in my work.

Also, and perhaps because of the recent past, in which the Germans had occupied the country, I am grateful to be part of a village community that suffered under the Nazis and accepted me anyway in their circle. For me this is not self-evident as soon as I was born after the war.

But precisely terrible and dramatic history phases with which we have been confronted always bring out artistic creations that are vital components for international understanding and overcoming these painful fates.

Through my visual language that moves away from the objectivity, I could reach statements in which by mere hints memories are evoked, where everyone is already encountered in any form. It is the color, suggestive combined in contrasting lines and geometric shapes, stacked, layered, nested, leading into an aesthetic order, which has lost its severity in Crete.This has meant that approach was taken at the meetings with Piero Meogrossi. As an architect and former director of the Colosseum in Rome, as an expert on the past history and at the same time as an ambassador of his visions into our new time, he expressed this in his drawings, which he celebrated with pencil and ink on white paper and came into being in Rome and in Lentas. The German writer and fancier of Crete Arn Strohmeyer has made us acquainted.

A title quickly was born: Black & White meets Color. My 25 works to be shown in the exhibition together with the 25 works by Piero Meogrossi, are a result of the last 2 years from my studio in Plora. With the planned further exhibitions in Calabria, Rome, Venice, Vienna, Munich and Berlin, Copenhagen and Stockholm, I want to show what I have experienced on our island and thus be an ambassador.

Peter Foeller