John Perretti is a walking, breathing enigma. A (once) fighter, an artist, a street kid, a philosopher. Clad in all black while passionate about the beauty of nature… I had a difficult time reckoning with who he was, Perretti is a unique human being, and at times, I wonder if he’s human at all.
- Scott Ross
- Donald Kuspit
- Paul Feinberg
- Jennifer Hoffman
- Alan Abramson
Of Tunnels, Time and Tumult: Overdosing On Imagery
Kyoto, Feb 2, 2025
When diving in the plural arts of John Perretti, you can be sure that it’s not going to be a jaunt.
Picture the chilly night the orchestra started playing Beethoven’s new symphony for the first time in mid-spring Vienna.
You sit waiting to get a glimpse of the Maestro, filled with curiosity and anticipation. But to the ear of the untrained, this is going to be just another evening at the theater to impress their peers. They will step into this realm infused with boredom and the hope that it’s not too bad or too long.
Until the music unfolds and unfurls its hand to lead them through its byways and depths, saturates the air, and creeps into the soul of even the most unconscious, unready, or uninterested.
New synapses are created. New dimensions are revealed.
Today, we witness that symphony in blacks, greys, and reds.
John Perretti’s art, just like its creator, is hard to define by words as much as it’s powerful and immediately recognizable.
Stylistically speaking, the most compelling aspect of these works is that they embody several styles which, just like when observing a Rorschach inkblot, change meaning and feel depending on the observer.
John Perretti’s art will sometimes remind you of Japanese irezumi and shodō; sometimes you see the principles of conceptual art stripped of their commercial purposes; and sometimes it is a nod to the great masters, from Monet to Bacon via Picasso. In all cases, there is a unique feel to them, somewhat darker, somewhat more rational, somewhat more enraged—it all depends on what you see in the inkblots.
Aesthetics aside, these works bear the weight of dark stories that were and remain untold, as though they were the soothing pops and crackles of a fire after a sacrifice is consummated. Where does that young girl’s dress come from? What’s with the arena? What lies beyond those lights and shadows?
If you look closely, you will see that this art is the story of the several lives Perretti has lived, each to the fullest – or, at least, each until its demise.
You read his poetry and prose in each stroke.
You see the rough hands of the hunter and spear fisher in his sculptures.
And, just as much, you feel twisted and tumultuous through his blacks, greys and reds as his opponents might have felt in his everlasting life as a martial artist.
The paintings, sculptures and compositions flow into one another, poking at each other, making references to each other, making the observer feel like either they have already seen this piece, or they will see it again but in another form. As though alive, the works seem to be whispering inside jokes that exist in the empty space between them.
When hovering in front of John Perretti’s art, what we see within its physical limits is but a window to a much wider and deeper landscape of visions that expand through history, philosophy, spirituality, and the unknown lands of the human soul. All as perceived by the eyes and the mind of the ‘martist’.
Watching it as a spectator is just a fraction of the Perretti experience.
Art that brings more questions than answers is always revitalizing. But the uniqueness of John Perretti’s art is that it seems to stand one step closer to answers we never knew we had, to questions we now start asking.
~ Sesto Keisuke Ueda
Of Memories, One Man’s Mandatory Memoir.
The Origin of a Species and The Mixed Martial Arts was a seven-year grapple, “Although one can never prove sincerity unto another, this is a work of non-fiction.”
And,
“Remember, my soul is not under censorship, I am telling you a life story.”
“All that is told here has been witnessed by many and may stretch your current conceptions. This is what we mostly pure pugilists pursue. No matter how diversified the beginning may seem, it all congealed, the end still untreaded upon. My interests and intentions are well travelled. As Nabokov wrote in Invitation to a Beheading, This we can call the pleasure of art; it occupies an important place in {my} life.”
“He has continued to dedicate himself to the largely unexplored territory between the fine and the martial arts.”
~ Jessica Hoffman
“The full scope of John Perretti’s talents and abilities is known to very few and can be appreciated by even fewer. As a fighter he was cunning, ruthless and impervious to pain and defeat. As a human being, he is sensitive, brilliant, resourceful, and brutally honest. If you could combine Da Vinci, Bruce Lee, and Budda, that would make up John Perretti.”
~ Dr. Alex Eingorn
Understanding his important past clues will give an enormous entrance wound as to the imagery held and displayed at The Silos show, both in painting and sculpture.
Half a century of unpublished poetry.
After a memoir was published, John Perretti’s practiced prose was compared to “Joyce or Kerouac”. This volume of careful consonance ages as the man has, in consistent candor, heart held moments, building bold barriers, and with frequent emotional eruptions.
The poetry is more manicured than the paintings ever were; language (even English) and is a trickier thermometer bearing written heat and consequential cold. You may feel like you are being mis-lead in font or preternaturally glamoured. He holds your gaze and walks you through thunderous love, sexual tumult, savage synchronicities, dangerous living, fire felled Facinus, and as if snelled in the gut, the telling tug appears. The intensely reined, cold told tales, and queries without quench, rap your mind tightly without touch, as if negative ions held the written atmosphere, pupils do dilate. An unconscienced struggle that explains everything as he writes, his nakedness you may even feel…
A history (his story) of past and present sculpture.
As is the interior of sacred Shinto shrines, the hidden is held from view within the most precious wooden constructions. Perretti has held megalithic scale sculptures in hand since the late 1970s. A one man show at 77 Green Street, NYC entitled, “Three Million Years of Evidence” spoke with hewn artifacts about our history being a mis-told tale. As Joseph Beuys lied about his past, Perretti’s new truths seem as foreboding, childlike, warlike, weathered, unfiltered, and not limited to land. His newest sculptures stand directly in concert with the large paintings in ballasted bookendedness. As Lichtenstein unveiled three-dimensional sculptures so similar to his past paintings, Perretti’s work may be now seen as through under skirted lace, only obscured to halt the locomotion of the viewer.
