SUPERNATURE

”Colour is the place where our brain and the universe meet.”

Paul Klee

Mucciaccia Gallery is delighted to present a solo exhibition of new paintings and drawings by Dan Perfect (b. 1965), an acclaimed British painter whose luminous abstract work fuses elements from the organic, urban and digital realms to create imaginary worlds using complex brushstrokes and nuanced hues. Perfect’s paintings create an amalgam from memories of books, films, video games and music, reflecting his desire to find some representation of, and solutions to, the question of who we are, where we come from and where we might be going. The resulting images are like dense forests; signs, rhythmic and layered, suggest the tangled undergrowth of the natural world or the myriad life forms floating under a microscope.

‘In these recent paintings, a diffuse and sensuous ground comes to the fore, drawing attention to textural detail and a transparency of paint application. The colour is heightened as if rendering the world through a filtered lens by the light of another planet’s sun. There is an overall sense of images forming in a mist, cities glimpsed from afar through fog, animals momentarily conjured up from clouds, cosmic conflagrations and the endless turmoil of nature. Things are on the edge of appearance or disappearance; on the cusp of becoming and then fading away from this world. Primeval biologics spar with digital abstraction, memories recalled and hacked by the online omniverse. We are both the observers of, and participants in, these natural phenomena, but the ambiguity of scale and flickering sense of presence provide little certainty as to how we relate to these sweeping, ecstatic worlds. Are these forces threatening to roll over us, galactic in their scale and dwarfing our concerns, or are they representations of microscopic cellular systems – quite literally our inner realities? Either way, this is not any kind of cool abstraction, but some kind of a hot mess. We are implicated and involved, there is a battle afoot and a reconfiguring in progress; the personal is public.’
Dan Perfect, 2021