Photo credit: Daniel McCullough
Nicholas Perry, “Bell,” 2018, Oil on canvas, 20 x 16 inches, courtesy the artist and The Alice Wilds.
Nicholas Perry’s work in “By Themselves” at Alice Wilds (through Sept. 14) didn’t crawl legless out of the primordial ooze; they’re portraits, on stretched canvas, in oil paint. They have historical precedents; Francis Bacon and George Condo come to mind, and from the immediate contemporary world they might suggest David Henry Nobody’s bizarre Instagram-based portrait performances. Still, these works feel so idiosyncratically unique that one has to assume they came from a hand who forgot where the Instagram icon was on his smartphone long before he mixed any paint.
“By Themselves,” despite its title, functions as a united body of work. His wonderful individual portraits greet the audience off the bat as a united cast of characters, who are still somehow wholly tender and sympathetic. We get the sense that these individuals are all part of a single giddy troupe right from the breezeway at Wilds, where the painting Bell symbolically rings in our arrival. The piece is typical of Perry’s ambiguous portraits with its patchwork of diverse painting passages against a gradated or quietly modulated background, all combining to what look like fractured and twisted early-Renaissance portraits. It’s a bizarre but refreshing perspective to encounter this age of hyper-clear and determined figuration.
Another work, entitled Hi!, engages viewers on a near wall with a limp and disarming outward wave, placing it in a charged position between formal and performative. An interlocking puzzle of ambitious multicolored painting sequences form an eccentric figure. Wearing a hat and a scarf, perhaps? He or she penetrates the fourth wall with the forward salute, an act that has traditionally been confrontational—in Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, for instance—but Perry’s painted creature proves that the act can be welcoming and vulnerable. Hi!’s protagonist possesses enough naïve buffoonery to distract initially from his painting chops—some of the most complex and considered you’ll ever encounter in works you want to hug at the same time.
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Perry cleverly leverages gestalt psychology in all his works, leaning on the natural urge for one to anthropomorphize a pile of paint in the shape of a head. In the case of the painting Musician, we imagine what must be of a beret-wearing, ruff-collared, horn-playing mouse. Or is it? One soon realizes that the information that supports such an elaborate read is actually extremely limited. Another work, Finally, I Can Cry, conjures pathos while offering even less confirming visual information than in Musician. So much less that one starts to question his own psychology. That is until a single awkwardly placed eye and tear are located. If not for that one visual tell, the work might live on as a stack of abstract components rather than in flesh and blood. Perry plies the margins between animate and inanimate deftly, making his misfit creatures all the more alive when they finally commit to life. While viewing the show, I began to imagine myself on the other end of one of the puppet shows I perform for my two little girls: an old gym sock, three marks on the toe seam in Sharpie, and voilà, I may as well be Dr. Frankenstein.
Residing in a pronounced figurative moment in contemporary art, where overt historical reference and declarations of identity win the day, Perry’s subtlety is welcome. While most 2019 practitioners of the figural leave little to the imagination, Perry leaves it just about everything, causing one to wonder whether his are figures at all, or just a bunch of gonzo painting moves hovering like clouds in a sky, somehow forming angels and cowboys with enough intense and willful scrutiny.
