Drawings
16 January – 2 March 2008
One in the Other is pleased to present an exhibition of drawings by Dan Perfect that will run concurrently with his show of new paintings at Chisenhale Gallery.
Perfect’s work came to prominence in ‘Death to the Fascist Insect that Preys on the Life of the People’ at Anthony d’Offay Gallery in 2001. A cartoon, Klee-like directory of pictorial schemata, in hard black outline, floated across abstracted grounds of hazy, airbrushed bands of rainbow colour – a subtle reworking of 1960’s post-painterly approach to abstraction. The ground of the paintings carried a bright opalescence that was both fixed and transparent – opaque and illusionistic. The pictorialism was a recurring index of motifs, figures and landscape architecture that owed much of its sovereignty to a lexicon of 1930’s Surrealism and 1950’s Anthropomorphism. In 2002, for these works, Perfect was selected for Becks’ Futures at the ICA, London.
From this way of structuring his images, Perfect started to radicalise his use of the schematic ground. Whereas previously the paintings could be thought of, in both their execution and composition, as following a system of figure and ground, they now collapse into a single, seamless myriad of visual activity. Whilst the bands of colour have disappeared, the lined, ‘drawn’ equation of the earlier work has been retained. This element, however, is now so amplified into a burgeoning cast of characters, squiggles, signs, symbols and leitmotifs, as to become a visual force and landscape itself - as opposed to the descriptive function it served formerly. It is now at the heart of a visual venture that encompasses graffiti and automatic drawing as well as the references to 1930’s and 1950’s imagery and painting.
At the root of all Perfect’s work are his drawings on paper. These act as an enterprise in themselves and a laboratory where subject matter is tested to its limits and the raw, sometimes pre-conscious act of fashioning imagery out of nothing is dredged up from within. Perfect’s drawings are microcosms of life, teeming with matter, activity, collisions and skewed narratives. Colour suffuses them and the idiomatic array of imagery is simultaneously hybridised and uniquely phantasmic - as though distilled from the murky waters between the rational and irrational mind. Perfect’s drawings also act as outriders for his paintings in the sense that he samples his own imagery, reanimating it and shifting the scale dramatically. They also represent a specific mindset in that they are produced exclusively over a two or three month period, often away from the studio and never at the same time as the paintings.
Dan Perfect has also exhibited at Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York, 2003, Karsten Schubert, London, 2003, Southampton City Art Gallery, 2005 and One in the Other, 2006. Accompanying his exhibition at Chisenhale Gallery is a full colour catalogue, featuring painting and drawing from 2005-2008, essay by Martin Herbert and text by Simon Wallis. The catalogue will be distributed by Ridinghouse.
Aleph 2007
Ink, watercolour and pastel on paper,
23 x 31cm
Village 2007
Ink, watercolour and pastel on paper,
23 x 31cm
Coming Down The Mountain 2005
Ink, watercolour and pastel on paper,
23 x 31cm
Intersex 2007
Ink, watercolour and pastel on paper,
26 x 36cm
Melee 2005
Ink, watercolour and pastel on paper,
23 x 31cm