After a few minutes, that same posture, that same waiting position, that same look, appears to me on one of the canvases that the stranger, who got off the Vespa, unrolled on the gallery table. In the painting, the man wears a feather headdress, almost two white wings, sitting in front of a brick wall, absorbed. A listless, distracted figure, but that evokes an ancient power. What looks like a messenger of gods at rest is the urban hero of Pier Paolo Perilli (Rome, 1974).

There is something primordial in all the works of the Roman painter. In its representations, the historical and temporal dimension vanishes. Mythology and urban life mix, the villages and Mount Olympus get confused, contemporary reality and classic stories lose their contours: looking at his paintings is like overhearing a conversation by Claudio Caligari, Alejandro Jodorowsky and Isaac Bashevis Singer who, sitting at the same table, give free rein to their narrative strength.

The urban hero (this is the definition that accompanies the canonical "Untitled" in the title of the work) of the wall seems to be the alter ego of its author, but if you ask him, he doesn't know, he doesn't want to tell you, he eludes the answer: in the artist's unstoppable flow of consciousness, clarifications, data, details are not important. Nothing is posing in his work. In his story, the image is accompanied by the narration of the state of mind. Perilli's painting has a narrative thread within itself, which unravels from the words in the rolled-up paintings, opened at the moment one by one, in a rhapsodic orality.

A fragmentation that reveals the artist's past as a poet and that now moves to his canvases, transported in the spacetime of a painter without study, who works where he can, leaning on tables in always different and temporary spaces, painting on materials that are never new, dirty, with a life behind him. In Perilli's brushstrokes, oil painting loses its shiny sensuality and becomes similar to a pastel or marker. The surface is rough, full of hasty traits and streaks, and dotted with spontaneous gaps and drips, the result of an expressive urgency rather than an academic virtuosity. No framing, no frame, no superstructure: it is only the color and the canvas that make the painter's dreamy juxtapositions tangible. Its edges, left bare, often bring out the texture of the support, the spots, the marks of the previous steps. The backgrounds, with seemingly low and light tones, overlapping the score of marks, patches, voids and lines, create a dense and thick fifth – milky skies and restless, windy landscapes, from which figures seem to emerge, hover, jump over the surface.

The scenes depicted by Pier Paolo 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. The eye and mind run to the Transavanguardia, to the Italian painting of the 1980s, to the predominance of the artist's unique subjectivity. The surrealist register dissolves into the fairy-tale one - embracing traditions and popular cultures that cross over into Eastern Europe - and flows into art brut.

The La naïveté of Pier Paolo Perilli is that of the painters: innate, automatic, ligabuesca. It comes up in the graphic monogram with which, anachronistically, it signs the pictorial space. A detail that, together with the formal layout, also reveals another matrix of the Roman artist: that of comics, the art of fragmentary narrative by images par excellence. The not finished of the margins encloses the action like a drawn vignette: a still space that guards the power of things in the making, which delimits a horizon within which seemingly immovable time and actions flow, with a before and after, to be discovered within the picture, self-conclusive. Fiction and reality that overlap in the construction of a subject, in the representation of an interiority, of a singularity of its own.

In the August of 1985, American writer John Updike published in Esquire an essay in which he identified fiction as “the most penetrating tool of self-analysis and self-exhibition that mankind has invented” (“The Importance of the Narrative,” in Harmonious Lies. Essays 1959 – 2007, Big Sur, 2020), concluding his long squander by asking some questions: “What is important, if not the individual? And what better place to know, evaluate and appreciate the dimension of individuality, than the harmonious lies of fiction?" Thanks to Pier Paolo Perilli, we now know that there is an answer to these questions, rhetorical in the writer's intentions. It's painting: let it be a lie, but beautiful.

Davide Ferri (b. Forlì, 1974) lives in Rome and works as an independent curator. He teaches Aesthetics at Rimini’s Academy of Fine Arts (LABA), and The Ergonomics of Exhibitions at Bologna’s Academy of Fine Arts. He has curated the Art Section of the Ipercorpo theatre festival since 2012. From 2001 to 2006, he was Artistic Director of the Contemporary Furniture Museum of Russi, near Ravenna.

He has curated many exhibitions and projects in contemporary art galleries and museums, including: Markus Schinwald – Misfits, Fondazione Antonio Coppola, Vicenza, 2020; Le realtà ordinarie, Palazzo De’ Toschi, Bologna, 2020; Neo Rauch - Rosa Loy, La Torre, Fondazione Antonio Coppola, Vicenza, 2019; Solo figura e sfondo / Courtesy Emilia Romagna, Arte Fiera, Bologna, 2019; Afro. Pensieri nella mano, Musei San Domenico di Forlì, 2015; La figurazione inevitabile. Una scena della pittura oggi, Centro per l'arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci, Prato, 2013.