Peter Peri

“I would say,” Ulrich went on eagerly, “that it’s like looking out over a wide shimmering sheet of water – so bright it seems like darkness to the eye, and on the far bank things don’t seem to be standing on solid ground but float in the air with a delicately exaggerated distinctness that’s almost painful and hallucinatory. The impression one gets is as much of intensification as of loss. One feels linked with everything but can’t get close to anything. You stand here, and the world stands there, overly subjective and overly objective, but both almost painfully clear, and what separates and unites these normally fused elements is a blazing darkness, an overflowing and extinction, a swinging in and out.”

— Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities

Towards the end of Musil’s The Man Without Qualities the hero attempts to describe rationally, through a sequence of polarities, the kind of mystical experience usually associated with mediaeval saints or visionaries. This attempt to define a feeling characterised by both intense intimacy and infinite distance is something similarly explored in Peter Peri’s work. This is most apparent in the shifts in scale, from micro to macro, and in imagery ranging from elaborate flower arrangements to planetary constellations.

Like Musil, Peri takes ideas of fixing and precision to a modernist extreme. The act of fixing in itself eclipses the subject under scrutiny and develops its own absurd presence. In his most recent paintings Peri develops linear geometric structures formed by the repeated drawing and effacing of coloured lines where the accumulation of mistakes and ghosting appear to form the real substance of the painting, with the rendered geometric forms functioning somewhat in a supplementary role. Likewise, the anthropomorphic aspects of Peri’s recent drawings of suggest a corporeality which retreats from us the more we concentrate on the constituting, minute, individual lines.

Overflow & Extinction is Peter Peri’s second solo exhibition at Counter Gallery. The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue and includes an interview with the artist and a text by Dan Fox.

Peter Peri (b.1971, London, England.)
Studied at Chelsea College of Art, London and graduated from the MA programme in 2003. He made his debut in 2003 at Bloomberg New Contemporaries. Recent exhibition includes We Disagree, Andrew Kreps/Wrong Gallery, New York. Forthcoming publications include; VITAMID D; New Perspectives in Drawing, Phaidon Press, New York and New Art from London, Thames & Hudson.