Lisa’s world
“ Painting is colour in action” – Josef Albers
Certainly is colour that immediately attracts in Lisa Perini paintings, because is colour that dominates and absorbs the perception of the work, its tonality. Thanks to the chromatic dominant this one has a radicalism that puts into crisis the traditional and codified system of tonalism and the minimalist experience of contemporary art that dries painting into monochromaticism. It is not to give an absolute value to the colour, isolating it from the ambient as a existential presence freed from any bound with painting, but to give it a value that would not be exclusively symbolic.
It is evident how this symbolisation is unavoidable because we are influenced by colours in our organic activity, imagine in the historic-cultural one. But before arriving to these aspects in Lisa Perini work, we clearly feel how colour is for her an amniotic liquid where her objects and characters are living. The artist further to proceed in a extremely strong iconic and chromatic simplification, gives life, almost in a literal sense, to a her own world that gets lymph from the matter to be painted.
The oil technique amplifies this sensation. And looking now and again to her painting, always intense and with an extraordinary sentimental density, we always try to pick up their essence.
This one, in my opinion,belongs not only to a reconstruction of a personal universe that reflects and explains itself on the canvas, but above all in a concept of painting as feed. The “thick pastes” as was said once of Informal painting, are in reality a tension to feed the work and its numerous components. Hyper-selectivity and therefore the absence of a gestaltic vision does never succeed, particularly from when in the last ten years her technical consciousness has grown, in unhinging the centrality of the colouristic mass that is the true bound and biologic binder of her composition.
I feel this dynamic aspect a true living matter that Lisa Perini organizes in always different shapes, more and more uncountably de-structured. Perhaps a certain hierarchy emerges among the figures in particular in the wonderful nude females of the end of ’90s, but the void has not a proper motivation because is the matter of the colour that saturates and innervates the composition.
As an historic of art, the idea that arises does concern her sources of learning, because in these figures, more that in other works, the memory of first impressionism or the fauve insubordination to perspective clearly emerge, as well as the superb lesson of Matisse.
But Lisa Perini looks at and recreates, her way of learning as an artist seems to have been a form of tuning and consciousness of language tools. Every progress in the use of techniques is employed to increase her possibilities of creating her own world, as this one could be structured in a parallel path of growth and imagination. Certainly in large red paintings, already perfectly studied by other experts, or the recent and incredible “whites”, is the painting that becomes a vital substrate, honey matter that accompanies the personages and sustain the objects that pile up for multiple associations. This polarization white/red is indicative of how the idea of opposing vitalisation and disappearing are central for Lisa Perini in her painting reflection. The white that appears in her paintings, probably in relationship with the disappearing of a familiar affect, is by itself the colour/not colour of death, of lost. Wonderful concerning pages exist by Sartre and Camus himself spoke about the dazzling white of meridian hour, when light blinding can produce everything and the absurd of existence manifest itself. If white is purity and virginity, by many cultures such as that Chinese becomes the symbol of death. But, especially in this case, beyond the “red domination” is just the white to wait for the results of a poetical reflection about life that cannot avoid to confront itself with its limitation.
It is true that during her activity the experience of colour has been for Perini sufficiently vast, but certainly her focus moved in the said direction. Then we find all her universe of object trouvé that proceeds hand in hand with painting and that especially in the painting finds its most complete expression. Here it becomes symbiotic, while in her sculptures, In three-dimensional objects, glass fragments,plastics and”thing” in general are more clearly linked to the support. Painting gives them life by incorporating them in the magmatic-epitelial tissue, by becoming more integrally a part of the whole.
Glasses, car reflectors, lamps fragments are always linked to light and transparency. By one side they bring with them their story, they are almost pieces of the world other that are absorbed and made proper by the artist. On the other side they are symbols of crossing and declination of the light to a conscious and desired direction. At the end the reason itself of the painting is not only giving shape to dreams and sentiments, but also capturing light and fixing it on the canvas. Language and matter in Lisa Perini are perfectly cohesive,just because there is a sort of organicity in its massive use of colour that is really place and substance of her works. Everything is living in a vitalistic dash that is multiplicity, that reflects the points of sight and refracts, even out of metaphor, the light lines.
This capacity of creating intensity, strength and energy is the characteristic of work of the Trevisan artist, that starting from the creation of her own world concentrated in composition and colour, succeeded in finding innumerable and valid links with the external world. And this capacity of relationship of her, is much more important because her language has not been confined in the fence of painting alone,even if this remains central and barycentric. Her curiosity for different form of experience and suggestion, brought her to photography, graphics, light box and installations. This testifies for a capacity of synthesis and opening to knowledge that in many artist tends to be rare once they found their own artistic cypher. In this case her magnificent freedom is just in being part of the art world, but always staying in her part, never falling into compromises that could dry her creative capacity. As to say that in the reconstruction of her poetry, many elements must still appear because they wait to be translated in the language of art,even at the same time a completive look to her work shows a formed and mature personality. For Lisa Perini the union of art and life is perfect, as that between the linguistic sphere and the sentimentality of doing, main road for communicating and transmitting emotions.
By Valerio Dehò