After just two years of painting, his first one-man show was in 1977 at St. Bartholomew’s Church on Park Avenue, New York. Those still life’s showed such painterly depth with silk screened imagery denoting time that Jim Dine could not resist copying them just after.
Similar to the inner sanctum of sacred Shinto shrines, the hidden mirror is held from view within the most precious, precise Hinoki wood’ constructions unlike most mortals have made. John Perretti has held megalithic scale sculptures in mind and hand since the late 1970s. A one man show at 77 Green Street, New York in 1980 entitled, “Three Million Years of Evidence” spoke with artificial artifacts about our hearing of history being a mis-told tale. His current commentary on all things aberrant (for him) amongst us is an ever-woven world of endless experientials of the now sixty-nine-year-old.
He was once coined, “The Martist” for his fisticuffs’ painterly commentaries on being a retired professional fighter. As in “Retired” the vacant ring is awash with broken barriers as watching witnesses or once willing audiences departing. The loneliness and love left is felt in his expressionism and handling of the brush. His coinage of Mixed Martial Arts and creation of two sports firmly support his past prowess. The work never seems to shout, seems almost tearful at times.
Donald Judd showed him boldly in “Monumental Space Variations” in New York with thirty-foot paintings of flying facinus’ through Greek Architecture. Perretti is half Neapolitan and half German. After finally living in Japan, he completed a triumvirate as during World War Two.
As Joseph Beuys lied about his pugilistic past, Perretti’s new truths seem like foreboding, childlike, warworn, weathered, unfiltered, and not limited to lubbers of land. His newest sculptures stand directly in concert with the large paintings in ballasted bookendedness. As in “The Somme”, a pigmented forest’s beckon from France in 1917 (an homage to his WWI trench running grandfather) illuminated by angelic oversite of the horrors happening. Echoes of haloed hatchings attack the eyes and seemingly the spine.
And then just adjacent, a large ellipse denoting Sumerian’ honesty of the almost end of the earth pronouncement in “The Deluge”. The ridiculous depth and innovative markings of the turmoil of the pre-biblical flooding of the earth speak unabashedly of Turner’s watercolors mixed with his hatchings which flatten the ground, confusing the eye.
Another bold ellipse entitled, “The Forest of Argonne”, the careful, continual hand hatchings again spring to life as explosions of color or luminescence and radiate through trunks and limbs as if Van Gogh was grappling with Perretti from the grave. A thought that may intrigue his martial following. The elevated almost whites remind one of Velasquez.
He suggests a told tale through the mouth of the Egyptian god Thoth via an actual Thomas Edison’ apparatus. The juxtaposed delicacy of the handling of the black walnut with the callous casting of iron is unlike any sculpture seen. It recalls Rauschenberg’s Canyon as combine.
He has no fear funneling Turner, Twombly or Kiefer through his own sleight of hand and fearlessness of telling of his own tale and time. His undying love for them is ever apparent. His hands seem sometimes dirtied with the telling of his soul’s story without censorship. In his deliberate devotion to draftsmanship, he recounts reserving time to spend weekends at the Metropolitan Museum Drawing Collection copying Manet and Ingres as a student. He went on to be the youngest faculty member of The School of Visual Arts at 24.
In “Event 1966” we look upon an injured cartoon character deposited before a vast theatrical crimson curtain, seemingly uncertain, naked, caught within a lost time.
As Lichtenstein unveiled three-dimensional sculptures so similar to his past paintings, Perretti’s sculptural work may be now seen as through under skirted lace, only oddly obscured to halt the locomotion of the viewer. There is a transparency of voice under barrels of cardboard and cannonading ejaculations of paper mâché black balls in combine with pigment. There is a voyeurism needed to peer in and past riveted surfaces to see the femineity of the interior spaces or the told falsity of our metallic sati light, the moon. As in his ageing, the oxidization of surfaces can push one away from noticing the softness of his hand-hewn homages to others. It seems as if he is constantly in careful comment.
As in, “Rabbit Surrounded by Knives”, a direct derivative of his second son, Enzo Augustus’s six-year-old painting, an arena again of danger for the startled hare may seem comical at first. The amount of overlaying of paint shows how hard he works to produce a final product.
He speaks again about the same journeys underground that he has outwardly spoken about since age 4. He also shows sixty-five-year-old drawings as proof vision and of life. The returning route of small studies open visual doors to the larger work. The sexuality of sub surface hides the untouched, concealed wither world, uncomfortable as it may be. The historical landscapes show the presence of overlook, of hope, of celestial serenity. Angelic or alien participation in the ethereal painterliness. This body of work unifies long discussions of tunnels, time and tumult.
He boldly states, “I wish to apply a time hold on the audience, to watch a reality unfold in front of my discourse, I want them to feel as if I had put my hands on them.”
