The key drawing ‘The Great God Pan’ features Peter Depelchin’s artistic playground to perfection and witnesses both of his delightful reinterpreting of art-historical content and his masterly skillfulness. Depelchin’s fascination with classical mythology and the god Pan with his entourage of fauns and satyrs is based on his extensive knowledge of art history and secondary literature. Alongside astrophysics, they are sources of endless inspiration. It manifests itself as a conceptual narrative, offering keys and motives to unveil layers of iconographic and contemporary meaning.

In the series ‘A Garden’, Peter Depelchin approaches the depicted space in a way that it transcends the flat surface of the drawing. He is convinced that depending on how space is conceived in an image, it adds symbolic meaning to the narrative and to the image itself. The artworks, part of the Hortus Conclusus series, served as a trigger to examine this particular relationship between representations of space and meaning beyond the represented. This conceptual series leaves out the narrative. He was inspired by Iranian and European medieval miniatures.

Rakhsh is the stallion of the protagonist Rustam in the Persian book of kings, Shahnamah, written in the eleventh century by the celebrated poet Firdausi. The epic chronicles battles and romances, tragedies and triumphs of contemporary Iran’s mythical and pre-Islamic history. Rustam, Persia’s Hercules, lassoes Rakhsh, before being drawn into all sorts of adventures, courses and defeats. Several times, however, his victory or his survival is due to his horse, Rakhsh. What encounters turned Rakhsh into a legendary horse? The artist invents Rakhsh adventures before being lassoed.

In his Genesis series (2024) consisting of 17 drawings, Peter Depelchin develops an origin story. His passionate following of the latest astrophysical developments led to the small sketches. For the drawings, he drew inspiration from relevant astrophysical telescope photographs, but they are far from literal representations. All the more because his aim was to develop an origin myth. Each drawing features a sentence in a self-designed typography that may provide an additional tip of the hat regarding Depelchin's evocative cosmogonic narrative.

.

.

.

.

.

.