Pearl Lam Galleries presents the first ever solo exhibition in Asia by acclaimed British artist Peter Peri, who has created a new series of largescale paintings for the show. Equal in size the paintings are built up by a dense monochrome screen of horizontal lines, bordered by a single black vertical strip, and maintain the artist’s ongoing engagement with a psychologically charged modernism.
In considering his first exhibition in Asia, Peri began to think about the French esoteric writer René Guénon, from whose 1953 book, The Reign of Quantity, the exhibition takes its title. In particular Peri was drawn to Guénon’s description of the orthogonal cross as a symbol of 'universal man' in eastern and western traditions. Peri has always been fascinated by the moment of intersection between the lines of a cross form, and their ability to become a paradoxical point where unity and division coexist; where a position is marked and also somehow concealed. Furthering this line of thought Peri explored Guénon’s explanation of the Taoist conception of the three dimensional, right angled cross, where the vertical represents the ‘will of heaven’, and the horizontal lines represent a profile vision of the circles of Taoist individual lives. These paintings made of single vertical and multiple horizontal lines should not however be viewed as illustrations of Guénon’s formula, but rather manifestations within abstraction of the continuous hiding/revealing dynamic at the point of intersection - which function here as a mechanism to explore shifting relationships between symbolism, abstraction and figuration.
Guénon’s anti modernist tendencies lead him to see contemporary society as one which would turn individuals into uniform but separated units. Peri, who has a personal relationship to early modernism, continually disrupts and disorients in his work, and sees the subject of his work as the “dissolution, or more precisely the fetishisation of dissolution, within modernity”. Each element of these works is interdependent, and cannot be isolated from the overall composition, which handles space with such complexity that the viewer is at once pushed to the surface of the work and the detail of the pen line, and simultaneously pulled into a seemingly infinite dimension.
Peri has worked consistently with the paint-markers and spray paint he first discovered as a young graffiti artist in London. In this new series a single marker pen colour becomes the ostensible subject of each painting through a meticulous buildup of parallel lines that cover the length of the canvas. The manual imperfection of this drawing process leads to a ‘flickering effect’ - a horizontal movement of colour that shifts and dissolves as we approach it - giving the paintings a tentative life of their own.
-Pearl Lam Galleries
Image: © Peter Peri
Courtesy of the artist and Pearl Lam Galleries