Wednesday, January 13, 2010

Gallery Hopping: Peter Peri



How fine is artist Peter Peri's line? That's what we set to find out on Friday when we attended his opening reception at Bortolami gallery on 25th street. The 38 year old artist's line so fine in his sparse drawings of graphite on unbleached paper that they even conceal Dada-ish microcosmic inscriptions, like "vision remembered forever," and, more mysteriously, "the new painter creates a world whose elements are also its means." Peter Peri wrestles, sharply, with the tension between line and volume in the drawings. How fine is Peri's line? Fine enough to suggest fragility.

The influences of Modernism are particularly present in his steel sculptures. The "precariously balanced assemblages" appear to be an artistic slight of hand, simultaneously works in steel yet somehow dislocated. Fausses-Reposes, for example, artfully reduces a precariously balanced reclining figure to it's secondary sexual characteristics and points of tension, not unlike an African or Cyladic sculpure.

The Peter Peri exhibition opened on January 8 at Bortolami Gallery and runs through February 20, 2010.

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