Peter Soneta: Individual in complex circles
by Fred Balvert

(...) Personal memories of his parental home and abstract models of the 'ideal surroundings' are the formal extremes that meet in the installation Voluntary Residency by Peter Soneta. Starting with the notion of 'self' as the center of experiences, the artist is looking for the meaning of relationships in a society that is becoming more complex day by day.
The artist researches the relation between the individual and his social surroundings. This analyses starts with the display of the individual in need for protection in ever extending surrounding circles: the body, clothes, cities and nations. While these circles are broadening, the complexity of relationships increases.
Our need for protection and communication are, according to Soneta, reason for the creation of artificial situations that we can rely on and accept as normal after a while. There's reason to believe that while we control the situations that we have deliberately created, we are also under control by their unforseen side effects.
His investigation begins at home. By cutting, modelling and collaging he visualises a tour through memories of his parental home. A deliberate confusion is introduced to question individual human uniqueness by alterating auto biographical material with generic images. Abstract schemes presented in the same exhbition space pretend to organise and structure this sensetive reverie by an objective approach of the subject matter. Identity thus looses specificity, the schemes serve merely as a model for an ideal living environment, but meanwhile prove the impossibility of mapping out future details. Details that in the long run will turn out to be the obstructors of evolution. (...)
(source: Kunstkrant, Centrum Beeldende Kunst Rotterdam, May 1998)

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