Jeffrey Perrott, I

Exhibition View

Jeffrey Perrott, I presents a single work, called I., comprised of fifty-five individual paintings on wood panels.  The panel’s identical size–and the paintings identical compositional structure–develop in the whole work a familiar Minimalist repetitive, modular installation.  Even the simple, heavy, thick plywood and lumber supposrts for these panels recall the mid-sixties obsession with those ‘man-made’ materials.

It’s the surfaces of these panels that mark their departure from their predecessors.  On each panel, hard-edged numbers are layered–obsessively, exactingly painted to maximum density with often decorative, saturated color.  The maximal result is apparent chaos, an organic mass of marks whose energy and speed seem to burst across the surface of each panel.  Returned by uncanny repetition to color and shape, numbers are transformed from signs of essential value to signs of essential place, at best.

But these chaotic accumulations also contain subtle signs of order–an underlying order, hidden by layering, diffused by difference in repetition.  Patterns emerge, successive numbers return, reappear, the whole builds the parts and the parts invoke the whole.  Systems suggest themselves, but only on further and continued investigation does such complicated order begin to get clearer.

The eye’s play of recognition, similarity and difference becomes a labyrinthine game of coincidence and connection, of paradoxes of revealing and concealing, order and chaos, similarity and difference, all tempered by the sheer organic, structural, visual beauty of the whole.

The result is a non-hierarchicalfeast for the eye and the mind.  A clear departure from the one-after-th-other repetition so familiar with Minimalist strategies, this non-hierarchy is not just visual.  It challenges hierarchy at its base–in our ability to establish meaure and value–to know zero from one.

To read artist statment for this series of work, click here