Irregular parallelepipeds and cubes crowd the airless space of the composition. The icy, pure colours that saturate them, untouched by shadow, struggle to chime with that deep-set dislocation of the image which the perspectival bodies appear to suggest. Meanwhile the grid of red signs clashes blatantly with the supposedly solid geometry, as though they had emerged from the lettering stencil of a crazed typesetter.
At the date of this painting, over ten years had passed since Perilli began testing the possible outcomes of this hopeless, implausible geometry of his, into which he poured his indomitably Dadaist and experimental spirit. “An insane geometry”, as he would call it, now begins to govern the image. In it, the stereometric aggregates resound with the absurd: threatening or dreamy, they live their vexed and ironic existence in a diapason of tension, both intellectual and emotional, to which the unbridgeable conflict between the chaste lucidity of the sign, the algid purity of the light and the absolute arbitrariness of the geometric construction ultimately lead.
Achille Perilli , Contractes
Contractes
Painting
20th century AD
Abstract
Artist
Date
1978
Material and technique
Oil on canvas
Measurements
65 x 81 cm
Compiler
Fabrizio D'Amico