“Condolences for the disappearance of Achille Perilli”
The San Marino Institutes, the San Marino National Gallery learn with great regret of the death of the artist Achille Perilli in Orvieto, the Umbrian town where I have been cultural for some time in a home-studio surrounded by greenery, expressing the deepest condolences. “A great master of Italian abstractionism, the painter of impossible and irrational geometries”. Thus the minister of culture, Dario Franceschini expressed himself. “His artistic production – continued the minister – has always maintained a close dialogue with the avant-gardes and has brought prestige and prestige to our country all over the world “. Inside the Collection of the National Gallery of San Marino, there are five works by the author, acquired following his retrospective anthological “Achille Perilli Continuum 1947/1982” at the Palazzo dei Congressi of the Republic of San Marino, in 1982, witnessed from a beautiful catalog published by Electa. Diagram of the ultimate reality (1958), is in the first room of the permanent seat of the San Marino National Gallery (Logge dei Volontari); Il fiore della liberà , (1963), fresco-painting on canvas was and visible at the Secretariat of State for Foreign Affairs; Il Guazzabuglio (1981) is at the Secretariat of State for Labor at Palazzo Mercuri. Two other works are part of the collection of the National Gallery: Logicus Solus (1974) and a sculpture, La norma (1968). Achille Perilli is one of the masters of Italian abstract art of the Second World War. Whose artistic events are mixed with political and cultural activism, especially in relation to the foundation of the Forma 1 group in Rome in 1947. Perilli’s work focuses on the relationship between painting and language, and on the autonomy of art with respect to real. Perilli has always maintained that the single painting does not interest him, it does not exist and instead does exist and the search times count. At the age of 19, in 1946, he was already painting: with his schoolmates, Dorazio and Guerrini, he organized the first exhibition of Roman student-painters held at the Giulio Cesare high school; the following year he had already moved on to abstract painting which at that time still few did. His Abstract Landscape of 1947 is among the historical works. Forma 1 was the first abstract group in Italy – and in Europe – after the war. “We found ourselves in opposition to the Roman school, which clearly dominated. The realist school was imposed by the Communist Party and therefore, in a certain sense, Guttuso became our enemy. With him an irremediable fracture was created”, said Perilli in a recent interview on ArtTribune, recalling a memorable season of avant-garde and commitment. An intense period like the next when Perilli with his artist friends, Totò Sanfilippo, Carla Accardi, founded a gallery in Rome, L’age D’Or, (the only one that, in addition to doing exhibitions, sold avant-garde magazines international) which was sent by Lucio Fontana to collaborate with the Milan Triennale. Since the seventies Perilli has devoted himself to ‘machinerie’, mutant structures, determined by an irrational methodology. Always in contact with the most avant-garde cultural environments, in 1971 he wrote the Manifesto of the Folle Image in the Imaginary Space; in 1972 he took part in the establishment of the Altro Group; in 1982 he published the manifesto Theory of the geometric irrational. He has also collaborated on theatrical productions. There are countless personal and collective exhibitions and retrospectives: from the one in Paris (“Achille Perilli. The geometric irrational” 1984), to the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome in 1988, from the National Chalcography of Rome in 1992 to the Mole Vanvitelliana in Ancona in 1998 and at the Rome Quadriennale. Achille Perilli participates in the Venice Biennials of 1952, 1958, 1962 and 1968, in this latest edition with a room dedicated to him. The last exhibition was held last March, an exhibition, organized by the Cambi auction house in Milan, in which the most recent paintings are combined with the works of the early Sixties, from the Comics series. Today, 20 October, a posthumous exhibition will open at the Mart in Rovereto.
cs Cultural Institutes – San Marino National Gallery