VFour color lithographs by Peter Paul are available from Grafos Verlag. They were all printed by the renowned printing house Matthieu AG, Zurich/Diesldorf. All four prints, as different as they may be, move around a central theme - Italian cities and their historical monuments. They are from an early period in his career, and are based on various compositional techniques. All the rows and ordering of architectural elements, the plan drawings, the architectural reference, the archeological fragmentation, all of this reveals the technical draftsman.

Venezianische Impressionen, (Venetian Impressions)printed in 1974, is one of his prints after Francesco Guardi. The spraying technique of the sketch captures the plate texture. An architect's dream, the print Römische Skizzen' (Roman Sketches) covers the paper to the edges in soft blue and brown tones. The capitol appears in cross section. The building fragments arise anew from the plans, the eye glances through foyers.

The Kolosseum (after Goethe's trip to Italy) prompts one to reach for a copy of Goethe's notes. In 'Coliseum', the circle becomes a crater, a fiery furnace of power, a prohibitive girth. The building becomes a hollow body which grows of the emptiness into the sky. A modern, decorative print with a plastic effect, preserved in the warm colors of the South.

The three-color lithograph of the Forum Romanum stands out, as if some of the rubble from the forum had been pressed into the paper and had faded there into a mere trace, or as if the fragment of the building had been concealed under plaster, packed into the paper of time. The print is composed all the way to the edges here also. A lithograph which takes the wrinkled paper (think of Christo) or laminated cardboard as an optical starting point. The original lithograph, 'Forum Romanum' takes up a creative method which Peter Paul had already been using on canvas in the 70's. The folding, the disposition of the cloth had become a medium of creation. Henceforth, he covered the frame with folded, wavy paper. Hence an image from 1972 is called 'Raffaello imballato', a wrapped, packaged Raphael. Peter Paul defamiliarized his architecture, which shines in his lithographs. He also worked with references and paraphrasing of classical etchings and drawings. Although he always remained true to the pencil drawing and tempera painting, his development drove the artist to take up new directions. ek