Perino & Vele

Galleria Alfonso Artiaco, Pozzuoli (Naples)
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Perino & Vele, sculpture’s enfants terribles, who base their prolific works on ignoble and versatile materials such as papier-mâché, surprise visitors here with a fabrication that is totally new and, unexpectedly, more reflective. The artists have not presented their well-known padded and quilted sculptures; there are no armchairs or bathtubs, cars, carpets, cacti, or giraffes, none of those domestic or exotic objects that have undergone a slightly disturbing disorientation in their declared uselessness. Instead, what dominates here is the absence of the object.

The artists have intervened upon the space’s walls, inserting two metal security grilles on the short sides of the room. From between the bars’ openings and through one of the half-opened grates spills out an uncontainable, wet papier-mâché of an acid-green color, not unlike the slime that the villain in Who Framed Roger Rabbit used in his attempt to destroy Cartoonia.

In an adjoining space, the visitor comes face to face with some of the artists’ quilts hung out on a drying line. Constructed from layers of papier-mâché, the works are made, as usual, with pulped newspapers of a variety of colors, providing nuances that range from grey and chestnut to pink. The huge quilts, their surfaces covered in a geometric china ink lattice of lead grey and black, turn the language of the newspapers’ written words into a graphic element, a point of departure for a form of sculpture-as-packaging.

The two artists thus reveal their modus operandi, inviting the visitor to enter into their workspace. The quilts dry during the course of the exhibition, giving concrete form to the wait and doubt that precede the choice of a new subject, to the continual tension between overflowing creativity and the necessity of shaping something understandable and communicable, avoiding banality and repetition.




Marcello Smarrelli
Translation by Amanda Coulson