Wenn der lahme Weber träumt er webe: [When the lame weaver dreams of weaving] - 2015

Flörsheim, Main, Germany:: Peter Malutzki,, 2015.. Edition of 42. 18 x 12.5 cm; 56 pages. Booklet with pamphlet stitch binding. Letterpress printed from handset type. Text in German. In slipcase. Signed and numbered by the artist. Peter Malutzki: "This relatively small 56-page book made of glassine paper is exclusively devoted to a poem by Clemens Brentano. What especially fascinated me about this famous poem was the contrast between dream and painful awakening. I immediately had pictorial associations - nothingwas more obvious than seeing Brentano's dreamers in the faces of people who are sleeping peacefully, their closed eyes a universally understood symbol of calm. In contrast: the sudden awakening, being immediately and unmistakably present in the wide open eyes of the 'naked truth'. Snap out of the dream. Stop imagining things. Look the facts straight in the eye. Or: Dream on. We all know the sayings. The tone of the poem changes with the line Kömmt dann Wahrheit mutternackt gelaufen [Then truth stark-naked comes running along]. Awakening is followed by the painful realization that the sweet miracles are drowning alone. From this moment on, the eyes ofthe people in the book are open. The faces are no longer peaceful. They regard us soberly, or are painfully distorted. The last face is a portrait of the poet, Clemens Brentano. He, too, turns a serious face toward us. He has been dead for more than 170 years, and does not know the terrible truths of our age.  "The image material comes from the internet; it was edited in Photoshop and printed with polymer plates using the four-color printing process. Thus four plates had to be made for each portrait, one for each color. However, the individual colors are not printed on top of each other on one page. The transparent glassine paper I used made it possible to distribute the four colors across four pages. The blue plate is printed on the front of the first page, and the yellow plate on the reverse; the red plate is printed on the front of the second page, and the black on its reverse. Thus each image is distributed among four pages (two sheets) of the book. On the one hand, the reader has the option of seeing the individual colors that make up the four-color image; on the other hand, the paper's transparency and translucency also allows the overlaid colors to be seen all at once. The best four-color print impression is created if the two sheets with all four colors of an image are held together up to the light. The reader's lighting situation thus plays an important role, and can create a wide range of impressions. Two lines of Brentano's poem, printed on the same glassine paper, lie between the color portrait series. In a certain sense, they also act as separating pages between the pictures." www.britanica.com (accessed 4/11/2017): "Clemens Brentano, [1778 - 1842] poet, novelist, and dramatist, one of the founders of the Heidelberg Romantic school, the second phase of German Romanticism, which emphasized German folklore and history. . . .Brentano was known for his imagination and the extraordinarily musical quality of his lyric poetry.