There’s a certain Slant of light

Umberto Di Marino Gallery is pleased to announce There’s a certain Slant of light, a solo exhibition by Diego Perrone conceived for the gallery spaces on the occasion of their first collaboration. The title quotes a poem by Emily Dickinson dedicated to a poignant attempt to describe slanting, lateral, non-frontal light, a light that does not reveal but evokes “an internal difference / where the meanings are.”

The exhibition presents a new body of work, produced entirely in Naples, arising from the observation of sunlight and the way its rays, passing through everyday glass objects, become distorted as they project onto a horizontal surface. Within this set of accidental refractions, a dual intention of translating the real image takes shape. On the one hand, photographs with glass-paste frames, where a crystallized nature surrounds the photographed caustics of light, held in the instant of their appearance. On the other, in the large paintings made with airbrush, charcoal, and chalk, fields of shadow on a white ground circumscribe the suggestions of light, which emerge as vaporized forms, cuts, or contours.

The two series function as parallel physics of the same visual information. Glass, from a liquid state, crystallizes into a form that retains a latent tension and, thanks to its transparency and chromatic variations, allows glimpses of the dynamics of its viscous state. Airbrush painting, usually precise, settles in thin layers, generating blurs and vibrations.

In both cases there is no stability, only provisional arrests. Glass solidifies a flow; painting fixes a vibration. One material changes state, the other remains a halo. In this oscillation, light does not clarify the image but assumes the role of a perceptual threshold, beyond which what appears concerns not only sight. As in Perrone’s previous works, depth here is not a space to be traversed but a mental condition: a device that folds the image back onto itself and transforms vision into an act of suspension, where what seems to recede actually persists in the present.