Posted on
2014-11-03
Anton Perich arrived on the New York art scene in 1970, as a photographer and pioneering videographer. “I got a still camera and went shooting every night,” he said, and his images – including those he published in Night, the magazine he founded in 1978 – captured the personalities and happenings of this wild moment in the city’s history. Seeking to collapse the gap between this tumultuous, creative reality and the sanitized world presented on the mainstream television of the day, Perich started shooting with a Sony Portapak video recorder. He transformed the craze and excess, the low-res soap operatic dramas of real people, into what we now recognize as reality TV.
Perich’s experimentation led him to create large-scale paintings, some that “reproduced” his iconic photographic images and some that were abstractions, electric noise, painting fields of color and lines fed by him into the machine. While his portraits reveal the ghost of an image, his uncropped abstract canvasses shift the focus of attention from the rich finished surfaces to the edges of the painting where the picture-writing process is laid bare. Machines are made to be perfect. In mechanically or electronically created contemporary artworks glitch/mistake/imperfection is often re-introduced into the outcome as if to humanize the tool.
The early paintings were made on raw canvas with acrylic or oil paint. In some places the paint gently permeates the canvas; in others the layers of paint have built up to a rich, voluptuous, and intense surface.
Opposite – Idol, 1978
Exhibition runs through to November 22nd, 2014
Postmasters Gallery
54 Franklin Street
New York
NY 10013
www.postmastersart.com
