David Ho Yeung Chan is a Hong Kong and Shanghai based curator who works with Pearl Lam Galleries and is the previous director of Osage Gallery and the Shanghai Gallery of Art at Three on the Bund.
Peter Peri (b. 1971) is a British artist based in London, UK.
David Chan (DC): Why do you title this exhibition Crescent ?
Peter Peri (PP): Crescent usually describes the curved sickle shape of the waxing or waning moon, but its original meaning revolves around growing, increasing, developing. I’m interested in the idea of a precise geometric shape that makes visible an unknowable infinite process, such as growth. This relationship creates something palpable but enigmatic that I’d like to express.
DC: What does Abstraction mean for you?
PP: My interest in Abstraction is mainly in the way it rests on organisation for its very life – and in how the problems of organisation in Abstraction can feed back into life.
DC: What are the potential connections between Abstraction and life?
PP: The basic problem of filling the void of a blank canvas or blank piece of paper without referring to some object in the world means that one must instigate growth using some kind of invented system. Filling the void with speculative systems in this way relies on imagination. It sheds light on us as organisms in relationship to the environment, because as humans we are a complex of systems, and also a part of myriad systems – nature, language, society, etc.
DC: What are some of the formal connections of your work with the Constructivist work of your late grandfather, Peter László Péri? What can we learn from the Constructivist movement now?
PP: To abstract means to cut and subtract; I prefer to think of my work as constructive rather than abstract, which is perhaps partly to do with my knowledge of Constructivism through my grandfather, who was one of its pioneers. I’d say my work aims at being socially constructive in the sense that it looks at systematic relationships between the organism and the environment.
This was actually one of the most interesting avenues explored by theorists of the Russian revolution, such as Alexander Bogdanov, who was an important influence on Constructivist art.
DC: You’ve titled one of the paintings in the exhibition ‘The Biregulator’, which takes reference from Bogdanov. He was one of the thinkers of the early twentieth century to influence Cybernetics and Systems Theory. Are your works commenting on today’s society and its dematerialization?
PP: Bogdanov’s idea of the Biregulator really interests me as something that maps formations in a system of double internal regulation. The Biregulator became something of a model for the paintings in this exhibition, for example, as a way that specific sets of colour could regulate each other to form a painting’s composition, or that curves and straight lines could interact.
I think Bogdanov’s work has huge relevance for current society. In terms of dematerialization and the internet, it resonates with what occurs between the macro, collective structures of the digital, and the minute, particular actions performed by us each as individual humans. For me, insistence on detail, the infinitesimal, the discreet, is a kind of constructive belligerence against those collective structures.
DC: Can you talk a bit more about how you use that model in making a painting?
PP: In the ‘Syntonic rhythm’ series, I start by choosing approximately 10 colours and dividing them into two sets, then pairing differing colours from each set. Whenever I come to a diagonal division in the painting, I restart the line in the opposing colour. The lines follow each other across the painting horizontally and vertically to create unforeseen rhythms of colour and form.
In the ‘Greys’ series, recognisable subjects, such as figures or waterfalls, are suggested by an interaction between quickly drawn crescents and straight lines that precisely follow the constraints of their curves. At the final stage, I sometimes adjust the composition to reinforce the figurative reading.
In the ‘Bi-logic’ series, a sequence of colours divides the angular forms, and the same sequence is enlarged to make the divisions in the background. I pay a lot of attention to junction points between form and ground – focusing on edges, overlaps and shadows. The resulting structures are like loops or circuits.
DC: In your paintings, everything is very precise and exact. How do you deal with accidents or something unexpected during the process of making?
PP: Because they are hand drawn, the way the lines accumulate can create unexpected glitches or fades in the surface. It can be where the ruler I use is uneven, or where the pen is running out of paint, or where I’m unconsciously pressing harder or softer. This evidence that these are lines made by hand with imperfections is important. In a wider sense, accidents are also an integral part of a narrative formed by the development between different works and different series of works. The narrative incorporates the failures, distractions, dead ends, accidents and successes that occur over time as an artist.
DC: There always seems to be an inherent contradictory nature in your work, e.g, you simultaneously stage parts and the whole, the finite and infinite, resonance and dissonance. How do you see them being resolved in the end, or do you just want to leave the viewers in a dilemma?
PP: I don’t think resolutions are possible or desirable, but coexistence is.
