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Who is in front of a sculpture by Augusto Perez – whether it’s an art lover who already knows the tormented work (the artist, born in Messina in 1929 and died in Naples in 2000, held important exhibitions in Italy and abroad, was invited to the La Biennale di Venezia in 1960 and 1966 and received widespread appreciation) or a person who encounters his work for the first time – suddenly becomes involved and disturbed by a kind of evocation, which is increasingly insinuated and strengthened, of the disasters that are staged every day in our time.
Yet Perez made these works in the last millennium, even if his statement dated 1969 already made us aware of his intentions:
“I would like that space and time that establish my sculptures were the same space and the same time as the present. In relation to which, however, the past is not in a relationship of exclusion but of simultaneity.”
EXTRAORDINARY SHAPER OF FORMS, HE ALSO PARTICIPATED IN TWO EDITIONS OF VENICE BIENNALE IN 1960 AND 1966
So, when Perez undertook mythology figures (Oedipus and the Sphinx, Crucifixion of Apollo of the Belvedere, Narcissus, Kronos, the inexorable time that devours everything) or with beings who stand on the ridge of an uncertain definition (Hermaphrodite, Great Centaur, Great Mermaid, progenitors of the present, disturbing cyborgs, in which artificial elements are grafted on a human body), or, again, with events that marked a turning point in human history (the Crucifixion-Deposition), which remain memorable (Terrae Motus) or evoke particular moments of life (Whisky, Anniversary), he has always tried to bend that time away to a reflection on the present.
That is why today we immediately perceive that the Perez works, although dated decades ago, have been able to introject the features of the future, since they throb something terribly familiar with which we are daily forced to confront: the devastation of cities and houses; the subtraction of thousands of people from the existence to which every living being has the right; the display of lacerations of wounded and martoriated bodies.
IN HIS WORK, ARTWORKS DEDICATED TO MYTHOLOGY MANAGE TO MAKE US REFLECT ON THE PRESENT TIME
Perez seems to have felt the horror we were heading towards, like the natives of America who were auscultating the soil to capture the approach of a danger: in his sculptures, shreds of bodies and tears of objects, often real wrecks – plotting of The Raft of the Medusa by Géricault – are aggregating and interpenetrating, in a process of germinating metamorphosis from the unknown landing.
This vocation of Perez to reflect on the spirit of the times had already been announced, at the beginning, with the mutated Trophies, and then with the cycle of the Mirrors, in which a head or figure stood next to an empty frame, aimed at crossing that ideal border and tempted, after being vainly reflected, to retrace the experience of Alice in Through the Mirror by Lewis Carroll.
AN ART THAT ALLUDES TO HOW TIME HAS NOW ERODED AND DISFIGURED, IN A CONTINUOUS RUNNING OF SHADOWS AND FLASHES
The objects (shelves, frames, columns, pedestals) inserted by Perez seem to lean on a humanity mutilated in the body and devastated in the soul. The artist is an extraordinary shaper – we always trace the frenetic path of the fingertips on clay, as in Little Night and the Sundials – that clearly outlines certain anatomical details (the palpitant breasts of a woman) and alludes to what time has now eroded and disfigured, in a continuous running of shadows and flashes.
WHILE REFLECTING ON THE INCOMMUNICABILITY, LONELINESS AND MADNESS, HE SHAPES FIGURES FROM THE INEXTRICABLE TANGLE OF TORTURE AND BEAUTY
Perez is a visionary sculptor – some mention the names of Rosso, Boccioni, Giacometti, Bacon – marked by a lucid delirium and the omens that crowded in his mind, aware of an impending general “deconstruction” (a term dear to Jacques Derrida), the incommunicability and loneliness, the madness and tragedy of the time in which he lived, and the inextricable tangle between misery and beauty, between the presence of life and the announcement of death, beyond the fallacious expectation of “magnificent and progressive,” denounced by Leopardi in La ginestra (“The Broom”).
Info
Nicola Loi – Studio Copernico
Via Copernico 10, Milano
Tel. +39 0267075049 – 3480610594
Materima, via Umberto I, 2
Casalbeltrame (NO)
info@studiocopernico.com
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