We cannot know whether there is a person hidden in the garbage bin with the black gloves sticking out of it, or what the destiny of the white lizards moving toward the centre of the painting might be. After all, his elaborate skating among things began at the beginning of the last decade when he created his tub with wings, a warming pan, a paper cup distributor and went on to suspend and hang these items inside and outside the field of vision. Everything tends toward everyday domestic life, where the contradictions of a closed universe that is only apparently reassuring explode. And so fish are tidily hung up on laundry lines with clothespins and, in an ironic overturning of the usual canons, the artist creates a series of tautological Object-Paintings by arranging a series of bottles in an empty frame. This must be a homage to Giorgio Morandi, who painted the metaphysical space of bottles covered with the dust of time all his life. In this case Perone “returns” his bottles of sand to the great master from Bologna in a symbolic transition between two universes that can sometimes still get in touch with one another. Nor should we forget animal farm, which Perone stages by denouncing the obscenities of a degenerate system. Genetic manipulation and the risks of cloning are themes around which the artist organises his representations, in terms of day-to-day theatre of the absurd. Just as he describes the violence suffered by geese in his 2004 De-portate, one of the very few works of his to contain a specific identification of content in a repertory normally identified by the generic name Untitled. The black tide in the Gulf of Mexico, the worst environmental calamity in American history, seems to be lucidly forecast in the 2003 installation the artist presents at the exhibition Napoli Anno Zero in which a horde of giant toads appears amidst barrels of oil. And then there are many cases in which huge eggs from who knows what crazy chicken appear on the scene in installations in which Perone takes up a domestic theme which, once extrapolated from its context, becomes a metaphor for an alarming form of food pollution; it is perhaps no mere chance that the year 2011 should start out with news of the dioxin egg scare in Europe. But Perone’s denunciation passes through a component of illusory monumentality in which every element is capable of circumnavigating the places of unstable reality. Sometimes the sandcastles stand up to the waves. But down there in Rotondi, a village of 3 thousand in the heart of Irpinia which the Romans called Castrum Rotundorum, sculpture seems to have become the official language. Along with Peppe Perone and his twin brother Lucio, also a sculptor, Emiliano Perino and Luca Vele live there: a classic duo in the plastic arts. Another illustrious citizen of Rotondi is Luigi Mainolfi, who has been making sculptures since the ’seventies. Not far away, in Paduli, lives Mimmo Paladino, who was Peppe’s mentor and discovered his talents when Peppe was his assistant. Is it simply chance that so many sculptors should come from this tiny bit of land in Campania? Probably not. In Rotondi and Paduli, you can hear the hidden breathing of things.
Notes:
(1)
A. Fiz, Sottovuoto in Perino & Vele. Sottovuoto, Electa, Milan 2008, p.22.
(2) M. (3) R.
Augé, Che ha fatto il futuro?, Elèuthera, Milan 2009, p.51 Caillois, Man, play and games, translated by Meyer Barash, The Free Press of Glencoe, Inc., 1961, p. 23.