I quadrucci

Galleria Eugenia Delfini is pleased to present I quadrucci, Pier Paolo Perilli’s second exhibition at the gallery.
The artist presents a new cycle of oil paintings consisting of more than twenty canvases depicting a world dense with tension, lost between secrets and terror, violence and splendor.
In the first canvas of this new series, installed on the table of the office, we glimpse a man entering a painting and discovering a reality made up of traps, discoveries, unmasking, murders, marriages, and other moments that recount the loves, struggles, and disappointments of the protagonist.

Perilli transforms his psychological states into highly structured and aesthetically powerful visual expressions by translating the images that inhabit his mind with rapid, thick brushstrokes, the result of an expressive urgency that leads him to bypass the rational mechanisms of the intellect and venture into his own poetic dimension.
Populated by a purely symbolic language (made up of animals, masks, double heads, small rituals, and games), his images are often dreamlike and express a strong imaginative and psychological dimension. What transpires from them is an irreverent and romantic attitude hidden behind a gaze that is both curious and distrustful.

Perilli is a visionary artist able to express his interior world by intertwining contemporary reality and popular traditions, characters from ancient mythology and urban life. Nothing is posed: the figures seem to launch themselves beyond the surface, the canvas is rough and wrinkled, the backgrounds violent and tender, the faces tormented. The register is surrealist but also fairy-tale-like, and in fairy tales, as linguist Vladimir Propp teaches us, the same characters perform multiple functions within the same story, and this is how fiction and reality overlap and the seemingly immobile narrative never ends.
Perilli thus, presents us with a world that is unknown yet familiar, new but resembling an old memory, demonstrating that the greatest potential of narrative construction is not only to be able to relive through it but above all to make everything more real.

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Pier Paolo Perilli (1974, Rome) is a painter and poet based in Rome.
While painting is at the center of his practice, so is writing short fairy tales, poems, and lyrics. These took the form of songs when he was the frontman of the hardcore punk band Redemption in the 1990s, or more recently, illustrations, comics, and videos.
In 2014, he was Artist in Residence at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris. Between 2010 and 2020, he lived and worked in Germany, exhibiting in solo shows in galleries in Berlin.
Recently, in 2024, Eugenia Delfini presented Perilli’s work with a solo exhibition in her gallery in Rome and, in the same year, with a solo booth at Artissima in Turin.