Diego Perrone
Galleria Massimo De Carlo, Milan, Italy
The title of Diego Perrone’s solo show at Galleria Massimo De Carlo, ‘Il Merda – parte prima (paesaggi)’ (The Shit – part one [landscapes]), has a long artistic lineage. Besides Piero Manzoni’s infamous cans (1961), merda is an Italian word with a noble literary tradition, first appearing in The Divine Comedy (1308-21), specifically in the eighth circle of Inferno, where sinners guilty of excessive flattery are immersed in a river of excrement. More recently, Pier Paolo Pasolini took the word almost directly from Dante in two late works, both of which appeared after his brutal murder in 1975. For example, in Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma (Salò or The 120 Days of Sodom, 1975), he dressed the perpetrators of Sadian atrocities of the Girone della Merda in fascist uniforms. In his unfinished novel Petrolio (Oil, published in fragments in 1992), a visionary tale on the corruption of Italy in the ‘70s, Pasolini devotes a long chapter to the horrible misadventures of ‘Il Merda’ and his girlfriend Cinzia, on the hellish backdrop of 20 streets around Via di Torpignattara. In this last ‘hypernovel’, Pasolini plays with manifold viewpoints, split personalities and simultaneity, in a fluid mixture of time, space and language, where the only possible unifying principle (or way out) is the experience of the senses.
Perrone, who titled one of his first videos The Suburbs Go into Battle (1998), and whose more recent sculptures probe the possibilities of shape-shifting, compressing each different phase of the production process into a single work-in-progress, must have felt at home with Petrolio. But it’s from the paintings of another great Italian master of doom, Mario Sironi, that Perrone takes his visual cues.
At Massimo De Carlo, Perrone has isolated some details from Sironi’s industrial landscapes and peripheries, then photographed, drawn or printed them. He then turned them into three-dimensional objects. The exhibition groups four works (all Untitled, 2009): a large, shiny ‘collage’ of folded aluminium sheets, hanging on high and thin iron legs, like dark sketches on a white page; a black modernist knot of graphite, iron and resin, protruding from the wall like a bullet stopped in mid-air; and two drawings on photographic paper, one framed, the other almost free-standing, with only one corner attached to the wall. The exhibition thus moves from a bi-dimensional plan to a three-dimensional one, and back again, with striking lightness. It is an exercise in what Italo Calvino called a ‘hermeneutics of multiple solutions’. The clean, well-lit, orderly white cube of the gallery overcomes all shadows, and seems to keep at bay the dark, stinking and often scary underbelly of the Bel Paese, so dear to Perrone.
Barbara Casavecchia
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