Peter Peri

The exhibition takes its title from a 1972 essay of literary criticism by Idris Parry. The essay opens with a reference to Leonardo Da Vinci’s description of the “abundance of designs and subjects” that is available as inspiration to the artist who studies “some old wall covered with dirt”. It closes with an account of another wall, this one taken from Rilke’s The Notebook of Malte Laurids Brigge (published 1910) in which the hero seeks out connections he feels are otherwise hidden below the surface of everyday life. He writes about a wall that is an infinite repository of images. It contains all his experience without omission or hierarchy. The wall is fearful, he says, “because it is at home in me”.

The titles of Peri’s new paintings – Telephone Talker, New Man, Athlete, Squabbler, Man with Bad Intentions and Fat Man (all 2008) – suggest seemingly human qualities. The names are the protagonists in the Russian Futurist opera Victory over the Sun. The costumes, designed by Kasimir Malevich, were made up of coloured geometric surfaces that were intended to suppress the actors’ individual body shapes in favour of an abstract, relational order. In giving such titles to sparse depictions of hovering spheres and linear structures Peri proposes an anthropomorphising inversion of Malevich’s formalising gesture.

Head 11, Head 12 and Head 13 (all 2008) are from a series of drawings begun in 2006. They depict spatially ambiguous mask-like constructions reminiscent of Modernist sculpture. The heads circular apertures can alternately be read as seeing eyes, holes in a represented volume, or merely gaps in an excessively articulated surface. This absence of hierarchy endows the drawings with an absurd quality, calling to mind the unstable identity in surface of Rilke’s wall.

Peter Peri (b.1971, London, England.) Studied at Chelsea College of Art, London and graduated from the MA programme in 2003. Lives and works in London. He has had solo shows at Art Now Tate Britain, Kunsthalle Basel and Giti Nourbakhsch, Berlin and has participated in Back to Black: Black in Current Painting, Kestnergesellschaft, Hannover, May 2008 and Beyond Measure: Conversations Across Art and Science – curated by Barry Phipps, Kettles Yard, Cambridge, April 2008. This is his third solo show at the gallery. For more information or images contact the gallery on 020 7684 8890 or email [email protected].