Pier Paolo Perilli

Pier Paolo Perilli (1974, Rome) is a painter and a poet based in Rome.

If painting is at the center of his practice, the writing of short fair tales, poems or lyrics is equally so. The lyrics took the form of songs when he was the frontman of the Punk Hardcore band Redemption in the 1990s, or more recently of illustrations, comics and videos.

In 2014 he was selected to attend the art residency at the Cité internationale des Arts in Paris; between 2010 and 2020 he lived in Germany and exhibited in solo shows at the RAAB Galerie and Galerie Gustav von Hirschheydt both in Berlin; and in 2015 he spreaded a manifesto of intention that many of us still remember.

Recently, in 2024 he was rediscovered by Eugenia Delfini and the same year he presented the last ten years of his pictorial production in the gallery and at Artissima 2024.

Perilli's figurative work does not adhere to any school or depend on any specific aesthetic. However, when you stand in front of one of his oil on canvas works, you can perceive his interest in the art of the 20th and 21st centuries, such as that of the Pre-Raphaelites, James Ensor or Leonora Carrington.

Perilli paints on found canvases what he first sees and perceives as an image. When these images appear, he memorizes and releases them into the paintings. Usually, he borrows some elements from reality, building with them mechanisms beyond the control of the intellect, thus venturing into the poetic. Populated by a purely symbolic language (as for example animals, masks, double heads, small rites and games...) his images are often dreamlike and the expression of a strong imaginative and psychological dimension.

Perilli's work is full of tension and reveals a world lost between secrets and terror, violence and splendor.

Art Critic Davide Ferri wrote about his work: "The scenes depicted by Perilli are in continuous transformation, captured in the moment of a form destined to change like a cloud. Against these violent and tender backdrops, people embrace each other like Marc Chagall's spouses. Everywhere, faces are tormented by bold pigments, a legacy of the German Expressionists; the deformed physiognomies morphing between human and animal bodies whose contours cannot be distinguished seem to have come out of Leonora Carrington's papers." (From the essay by Davide Ferri)

Pier Paolo Perilli

I quadrucci

che sia una bugia, ma bella