Jeff Perrone at Holly Solomon - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

It's hard to know in what way to take Jeff Perrone's wall assemblages of ground ethnographic textiles combined with his possess ceramic plaques decorated with non-Western motifs. His pieces are sure a celebration of trans-cultural human visual ingenuity. on the contrary what exactly is the frame of mind beneath which they are produced? They could be seen as late Pattern-&-Decoration effusions, as politically motivated multicultural assimilations or, negatively, as the offhand assumption of a right-to-take that is a postmodern form of colonialism. Perrone a critic as well as an artist, acts primarily as a compiler or archivist here; his nearness as maker comes through in the clay tiles, which exhibit his hand, but the work center upon the conceptual evidence of his choices.

The four large works shown in the throw room consist of squares and rectangles of fabric arranged into fill ups with groups of two or three or four ceramic tiles rapiered into the lower corners or stairstepped across the top cutting side The fabrics are patterned in primarily natural tints Probably the only ones that greatest in quantity people would recognize are the African dirt cloths; cowrie shells on single work make another link to Africa. Another piece has a tile labeled with continuous, equally spaced close capital letters that spell without "FABRIQUE AU MALI." The tile decorations are more clearly derived from multiple locales. There are depictions of poppies and winged beasts and harem exhibitions that look Middle Eastern, footprints of Buddha inset with types that probably come from India, a Japanese Oribe swirling-waters design and a silhouette that gazes like an African carving of a figure with a snake. The overall impression is of loosenes and complexity. The uncompounded bodys are strikingly diverse yet harmonious.

My have responses to the work have the appearance caught in webs of ambivalence: by what means strong the images, yet in what way random the composition; how enticing the surfaces, notwithstanding how inconclusive the impact; in what manner respectful the choices, yet by what means passive their use. The work as a whole, for all its sensory focus, transmits an emotional distance that may be the event of appreciating but not believing: all these things are meaningful harvests of cultural systems that are not the artist's be in possession of Gathered together, they seem to be evidence of his otherness and his inability to either synthesize what he finds in them into a late-20th-century American life or to find equivalents in his have context. He catalogues them on the contrary makes nothing of them. If single is an esthetic citizen of the world, what community does individual belong to?

COPYRIGHT 1998 Brant Publications, Inc.

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