RIBOT is pleased to present the first solo gallery exhibition of Stefano Perrone (Monza, 1985, lives and works between Milan and Paris). A graduate in Industrial Design from Politecnico di Milano, Perrone has a background in advertising, having worked as an art director for five years, collaborating with some of the most renowned international agencies. His painting, characterized by a very personal and distinctive style—a unicum in the context of young Italian art—investigates the relationship between the individual and society and concomitant interactions with the community. It privileges the representation of everyday subjects or objects taken from images found on the web or social networks—instagram in particular—belonging to unknown individuals and subsequently reworked.
The works created for this exhibition have arisen out of a careful reflection on the image and its other meaning. They are not to be understood in terms of representation but as an opportunity to open a broader discussion around the uncontrolled spread of photographic files online, usually through search engines or social media channels, and their paradox. Perrone explains, “In a time when technology allows anyone to produce perfect, high-resolution images, banality, imperfection, oversaturation, or even loss of quality due to online uploading becomes interesting aesthetic dimensions.” The choice of subjects represented—landscapes, flowers, and more rarely everyday objects—selected from the countless proposals that the algorithm subliminally continues to offer us in various forms, thus appears as an act of initial surrender to the “dictates” of the web that finds its redemption in the practice of painting, and indeed the exercise of painting.
Perrone’s technique, the precise gait of his gesture, and the use of flat, clean painting with bright, saturated colors restore texture to things, from the more typical landscapes where the blue sky is crossed by the whiteness of clouds, to the lush green meadows, and the iconic, emblematic liveliness of daffodils, which become the protagonists of the works on the lower floor of the gallery. There is, however, an element that “disturbs” and intervenes in the cleanliness of the paintings—a component that is both a characteristic and distinctive feature of the artist’s work and an unprecedented element: the so-called “watermark,” painted almost transparently on each work where the artist’s last name can be read. This graphic motif, generally used to certify the originality of a product and to prevent the distribution of unauthorized copies, claims with a veil of irony the act of appropriation of the image and reaffirms the conceptual value of Perrone’s work.
The same filigree motif is found isolated on the floor of the exhibition space and refers even more clearly to the use in his work of elements drawn from the world of graphics. In previous cycles to assume this role were the vector and colored lines that crossed the paintings generating a very particular syncretism between abstract and figurative. The memory of this remains in some of the paintings exhibited on the lower floor of the gallery. For the first time in this unprecedented cycle, however, it is the watermark that fulfills this function.
A special project was made for the occasion in six different pieces. An engraving made on sheets of aluminum paper where iconographic themes akin to the paintings are imprinted, as well as the watermark above.
