Light as a Liquid (I Dream of Picasso), Mike Perry, 2016
Mike Perry’s new batch of paintings are loud. Looking at one of them feels like someone is screaming right in front of your face; they cannot and will not be ignored. The New York-based painter and illustrator’s most recent exhibition, Intoxicating Pollen Wiggling in a Moist Journey of Constantly Blooming Tides, just opened late last week at the Garis & Hahn Gallery in New York. This new collection of anamorphic compositions work with a brazenly unnatural color palate. His images are captured through a particularly flat, almost childish two dimensionality that makes the paint look like it's almost melting off the canvas. The show is stacked with new works on canvas that range from abstract still lifes to simple and playful experiments with color and line.
The paintings in this new show produce a curious lens, like you’re looking at an image underwater from above the surface: they’re sinuous in form and ostentatious in their expression. Perry’s sprightly painting style and use of radiant, almost neon paint, forms a rambunctious lusty image, forcing the viewer’s undivided attention. The Garis & Hahn Gallery says Perry’s work, “explores how light becomes liquid, and renders such unseen forces as gravitational waves, blurring boundaries of bodies and creating hypnotic whirlpools in the midst of his portraits.” The gallery claims these large scale paintings embody all of Perry’s signature elements through a “series of kaleidoscopic abstractions and ebullient distillations of the pop and surrealist canon.” Perry’s muddied renditions subtly hint at characters of inspiration: his more agrarian scenes might call to mind the overgrown forest landscapes of French post impressionist Henri Rousseau, his unique studies of the human body may recall Matisse’s Dance and Blue Nude cut-outs.
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Bunkbed Pillars, Mike Perry, 2016
The gallery writes, “A still life of a banana attached to a biomorphic form is a dreamlike, ecstatic vision evoking the work of Heinz Edelmann and the advertising vernacular of Milton Glaser.”
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