Peter Peri’s abstract paintings resound with a dislocated and ephemeral ambience. Transcending the apprehension of perceptible space, Peri’s astringent compositions oscillate between both macro and microcosmic conceptions of scale. Emerging from and enmeshed within abyssal black grounds, faintly tinted cilia and floating orbs suggest molecular structures or cosmological configurations, converting the precision language of science into visualisations that are poetic and sublime.

With titles such as Bloodsucker, Slab Block, and The Hearing Forest And The Seeing Field, Peri’s canvases offer portentous suggestions, extracting a disquieting mysticism from their sparse pictorial fields. Within the pristine contours of his diagrammatical motifs, Peri interrupts the ascetic sterility of his surfaces with minute traces of intimate intervention. In areas the pitch density of his veneer spontaneously bubbles over impasto under-painting or erodes to leave an oil-stained effect; while delicately rendered lines and arcs shift imperceptibly in tone, some vanishing into nowhere, others interceding with trailing drips of paint. Through this subtle mediation, Peri’s work entrances with a rarefied elegance, creating a highly articulate abstraction that is both analytical and synesthetic.

The word that springs to mind looking at these images is holistic not a particularly fashionable one to use in art criticism, with its echoes of New Age marketing or the kinds of artists who still think it’s worthwhile pursuing quasi-religious giganticism. Yet the idea of holism put snappily by the Penguin Dictionary of Modern Thought as the thesis that wholes, or some wholes, are more than the sums of their parts in the sense that the wholes in questions have characteristics that cannot be explained in terms of the properties and relations to one another of their constituents seems apt in Peri’s case. On a purely formal level (if there is such a thing) they oscillate between microscopic and macroscopic levels, old-fashioned studies in opticality.Against unbleached paper the texture of pumice stone each hairline bulks out into an undulating graphic wormery that tickles the eyes. Back away, and elementary shapes begin to constitute themselves cancerous tumours, rectilinear slabs, or the occasional graceful arc redolent of an architectural detail. Some of these follicle stylings amass themselves into more readily identifiable representations; an exotic looking headrest, say, or an ornate ceremonial religious prop.

These forms are positioned awkwardly on the page, like cress seeds sown on damp tissue, left free to grow. So fibrous are these drawings that I almost feel the urge to shave them. And such a peculiar choice of imagery Roman Catholic reliquaries, ethnographic trophies, sleek Modernist graphics.

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By: Saatchi-gallery