The Reign of Quantity

Singapore—Pearl Lam Galleries is pleased to present the first ever solo exhibition in Asia by British artist Peter Peri, who has created a new series of large-scale paintings for the show. Equal in size, the paintings are built up by a dense monochrome screen of horizontal lines, bordered by a single black vertical strip, and maintain the artist’s ongoing engagement with a psychologically charged modernism.

In considering his first exhibition in Asia, Peri began to think about the French esoteric writer René Guénon, from whose 1953 book, The Reign of Quantity, the exhibition takes its title. In particular, Peri was drawn to Guénon’s description of the orthogonal cross as a symbol of ‘universal man’ in Eastern and Western traditions. Peri has always been fascinated by the moment of intersection between the lines of a cross form, and their ability to become a paradoxical point where unity and division coexist—where a position is marked and also somehow concealed. Furthering this line of thought, Peri explored Guénon’s explanation of the Taoist conception of the three dimensional, right angled cross, where the vertical represents the ‘will of heaven’, and the horizontal line represent a profile vision of the circles of Taoist individual lives. These paintings made of single vertical and multiple horizontal lines should not, however, be viewed as illustrations of Guénon’s formula, but rather as manifestations within abstraction of the continuous hiding/revealing dynamic at the point of intersection, which function here as a mechanism to explore shifting relationships between symbolism, abstraction, and figuration.