“What do you believe in?”, I asked Peter. Peter is an artist and painter whose work serves as a cultural reflection of society and allegorically reflects the era of our complex information age. He inhaled deeply. “Believe? There is a blur between believing and knowing. What is a belief? Is there such a thing as true knowledge? Isn’t everything a belief?” He paused. "I would say, believing is the wrong term – rather, it is a conviction. What do I take for true, and what do I assign the value of reality to?

Knowledge is an illusion because it depends on a certain confirmation mechanism. Now, on what criteria do we base our confirmation? Consensus, correspondence, coherence, pragmatism? Regarding the latter, Calvinists would argue that those who are successful are right – those who succeed are on the right path. These criteria are nebulous.”

“For belief to be true, there needs to be a coherent concept of truth: Everything needs to be transferred into one coherent image, a symbolic system that has the ability to transcribe symbols of truth in a back flow-stable manner. What is true can give feedback in this system saying ‘yes, this is true’.

An example of a system that cannot do so would be those geometrical figures that look different from every angle and position of the spectator. Someone might see it from the back and claim it is a circle, somebody else might see it from the side and claim it is a square. That system is not back flow-stable. You need to assume that the other person is lying or insane if you want your truth to stay true. Or, you could make this consistent this by qualifying your truth by saying ‘From my perspective this is a circle / square.’

Truth always needs to be able to expand at its edges, truth is not a dogma, but a process.”

“What I do believe in, though, or what I am convinced of, to be precise, is that it makes sense to use the theoretical category of systems to look at politics and reality in general. In politics, terms are weaponised to categorise people and put them in boxes where they get shot – literally or metaphorically. I think that as an artist, your work always has a political dimension, and be it Biedermeier.”

Peter’s current work bridges Biedermeier and system critique: He paints on ceramic plates – scenes of violence and vice. Eat from this plate in the tranquility of your home.

As our conversation carried on, we talked about systems of power, and how those systems are not backflow stable. Rather, a certain person or group claims something to be true, and because that person or group is located at a different level from the group they exert power over, the proclaimed truth cannot be revised within that very system. He told me that the chess game was a perfect metaphor for this: There is the level of the chess board and the figures in it, but the power is held by the player who operates on a different level outside the board.

Peter’s smallest is most obviously inspired by a chess board – but a chess board that has been and is expanding like a fractal, or a palimpsest. You can see traces of this process making the smallest just a square of a bigger game. While the first layer was straight, black and white, the second layer is distorted, and the third layer is just a pink nebulous field. But if you can still win and navigate in the system, you are right, aren’t you? And the chess figure? A little diamond representing the many facets of truth.