For Jeff Perrott, art is an investigation into the of nature of existence. He’s a conceptual artist who has dallied in a variety of media to explore topics such as emptiness and chaos. For his painting show at LaMontagne Gallery, “Random Walks in Endless Fields,’’ Perrott deploys an arbitrary system to direct a line across the canvas — he uses a spinner to point the way. After a fixed length, he spins again and the line moves in a new direction. At each shift, the color changes. The result: Colorful spaghetti tangles squirming over and sometimes off the canvas.
Leaving (most of) it up to chance
Jeff Perrott points his art in new directions
Artists have deployed chance in their aesthetic decisions at least as far back as Marcel Duchamp. It’s a nod, in Buddhist terms, to the potency of what arises in the moment. Perrott is no longer the sole author of the painting; he is collaborating with chance. Some would say he’s embracing chaos theory. Others might suggest he’s dancing with God.
But does it make for good paintings? These loopy, drippy works evoke Abstract Expressionism. There’s a tart irony in that; Abstract Expressionists are legendary for being heroically self-directed. They weren’t rolling dice to determine their next move. The sheer painterliness of Perrott’s lines can’t help but imply gestural intention, and there’s a meaty contradiction in that.
Some of the paintings drew me in; others I whiffed by. I expect that’s because luck directed their composition (at least in part; Perrott must have decided where to begin, when to finish, and what colors to use). “RW 11 (Elemenopia)’’ is a wormy snarl of shifting tones; as the loops build up in the middle, they get so entangled that any sense of space is compromised. I preferred “RW 1 (Crux),’’ in which the lines are brawnier and more fluid, and drips rush from them down the canvas, a reminder of paint’s vagaries — and how chancy painting anything can be, whether directed by a spinner or born entirely from the artist’s head.
Perrott has a concurrent show of the same body of work at Morgan Lehman Gallery in New York. Catalog images suggest that the New York exhibit features one large canvas, “Nothing Doing,’’ in which the loops are so dense they generate their own jazzy energy. They overtake the field, and that’s when the sheer randomness of the enterprise explodes into something visceral and commanding. Of course, it’s impossible to judge merely from a catalog reproduction. I wish that painting had been on view here.
Tone poems
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