Peter Peri : Course

18 Jun-31 Jul 2020

Overview

Almine Rech London is pleased to present Course, an exhibition of recent work by London-based artist Peter Peri. This will be the artist’s fourth exhibition with the gallery. Candy-striped beams radiate around a quadrilateral shape, bleeding. Hand drawn with a ruler, aerosol paint and flecks of ink, the coloured lines exude demonic symmetry. Staring at Peter Peri’s large painting Super Topology (2019) resembles something like riding a carousel at a haunted, Victorian-style fun fair, whirling into the dark. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the artist’s earlier projects were inspired by horror novels. I sense the phantom of writer H.P. Lovecraft lurking beneath the saccharine grid on view here. In the 1920s Lovecraft – who was a real noxious ghoul – drifted around New England’s white, neo-Gothic buildings and picket-fenced, emerald lawns, penning weird tales inimitable in their vistas of despair and bone-soaking chill. Peri’s paintings, such as The Call (2005), referenced Lovecraft’s ‘Cthulhu mythos’: a cycle of stories about a Leviathan-like creature who rises from the depths of time to torment humanity. Peri’s spiralling compositions remind me of Lovecraftian narrative arcs: the writer’s monstrous ‘circling’ around a cold space. They synthesize a vortex and pull you into the centre.