25 February – 28 March 2009: Spirits of Salt
For his fifth show at Sadie Coles HQ, Simon Periton expands on his continuing series of paintings on glass. In recent years, Periton has moved away from the intricate paper cut-outs with which he made his name, to a more visually complex and ambiguous practice. There is a process of blurring and coalescence at work which marks a departure from the formal directness of the paper pieces.
While each work in the show has its own internal logic (formal symmetries, colour, composition), each is made quite intuitively. Periton likens the development of his pieces to the growth of cultures in petri dishes. Frequently dark, they fluctuate between the gothic and the psychedelic, evoking various modes of spiritualism as well as betraying an aestheticist relish for senseless acts of beauty. Eyes and holes abound in the new work, adding to its sense of occultism. The frames assume more of a role this time in a variety of shapes including rounds and diamonds, the glass in one concave, in another convex. A number of pieces are silvered on the back, and it is here that the clue to the show’s name lies. Spirits of Salt, though it may sound supernatural, is in fact the household name for a hydrochloric acid solution – the only thing that will remove the silver from an old mirror. It is in this kind of perverse detail – the poetry of the ordinary – that Periton delights.
The way in which the work is made is almost alchemical. Periton’s interests in social freedoms, alternative social models (successful or failed), decoration, and pattern prevail, but his abdication of effect to the chance processes of production allows the work to slide neatly into the esoteric hinterlands that captivate him. It teeters ever on the brink of the otherworldly, at points broaching the studiedly peculiar realms of science fiction. For Periton, the illusory aspects of the work underscore how much of a fiction painting can be. Indeed, a tension arises out of the simultaneous success and failure of artistic and utopian ideals. As with Periton’s earliest anarchy doilies, the original intention is not to make art that is political, but rather to question those very stances that purport to be an effective means of change.
Simon Periton was born in England in 1964 and studied at Central St Martin’s School of Art, London. He has exhibited widely in Britain and internationally. Solo shows include Mint Poisoner, Inverleith House, Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh, 2003. Periton’s work is to be included in a prominent group show at Tate St Ives later this year. Other group exhibitions have included Wunschwelten, Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, Germany, 2007, and the 2007 and 2004 Summer Exhibitions at the Royal Academy, London. Commissions include public sculpture projects for firstsite, Colchester, Essex, Channel Four, and the Victoria and Albert Museum. A monograph of his work with an essay by Michael Bracewell was published in 2008 by Koenig Books Ltd and Sadie Coles HQ. Simon Periton lives and works in London.
05 September – 04 October 2007: Back to Nature
Simon Periton is known for his intricate paper cut-outs. For his fourth show at HQ, Periton has expanded his technique by retracing sculptural forms from his previous paper works and stenciling them to glass. These new spray-paintings on glass use multiple layering and the mutation of one image into another to create a hypnotic collage of his particular visual vocabulary.
The new paintings portray strange metamorphic creatures who appear out of the shadows, caught in spaces somewhere between landscape and domestic interior. Strange plant figures (part fashion, part flower arrangement) peer out from behind curtains, and mounted riot police stuck on a carousel must fight their way out of an overgrown organic trap. The show creates a society mediated by celebrities, chavs and royalty: A bunch of haemophiliacs raised by alsation dogs on a council tip (Blue Orchids).
These layers of dark, yet playful, images layer a selection of his previous doilies - Charger, Smokescreen, Beelzebub, Garden of Earthly Delights, Doilies, Anarchy, Flags, Hole, Domestic Violence and Scalpels - combined with new found images - Israeli soldiers clearing Jewish settlers, a Spanish flamenco dancer, royal portraits from the seventies, and a selection of old flower arrangements. The result is an increasing complexity of imagery, though Periton is still interested in the same themes: order and anarchy, imprisonment and escape, decoration and disorder, love and death.
Back to Nature refers to a return to, and denial of, the past. A type of Fin de Siecle with its ominous mixture of opulence and decadence, combined with a shared prospect of unavoidable, radical change.
Simon Periton lives and works in London. Recent commissions include public sculpture projects for Firstsite, Channel Four and the Victoria and Albert Museum.
13 October – 20 November 2004: The Edge of the World
For his third show at HQ Simon Periton takes his scalpel to our rural landscapes and urban wastelands. Railway tracks, graffiti tagged walls and abandoned factories meet Suffolk hedgerows and an idyllic landscape taken from the repeated pattern of a net curtain. The source material travels from the pylon studded English countryside to the oil fields of the Middle East, ranging from a parochial vision of damaged arcadia to the heart of destruction on a global scale. Stairway to Heaven, a floor to ceiling multiple layered vista of oil wells and electricity pylons stands as the centre piece. The title of the show is borrowed from Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s film The Edge of the World (1937), with which it shares a romantic, but slightly doom laden air, a kind of melancholic nostalgia.
Periton’s cut paper works develop the window metaphor inherent in landscape paintings, as the negative spaces create apertures. From here he plays further with dimensions and illusions of depth through his layering of coloured paper, while the large scale allows the works to engulf us like the great outdoors or the make believe stage flats of a theatre or film set. The repetition of elements, off set by slight discrepancies within mirror images enhances this natural, vegetal dimension. Furthermore there is an organic quality to the intricately cut, delicate layers of paper, strands held together in a dense web, mirroring the dichotomous fragility and tenacity of a creeper as they spread out across the gallery walls.
Simon Periton lives and works in London. He has had solo shows throughout Europe and the US, including Mint Poisoner at Inverleith House, Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh (2003) and Strategies of Desire, Kunsthaus Baselland (2004) and his work has been included in many group shows including this year’s Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy for which he was nominated for the Charles Wollaston Award. He has worked on many collaborations including working with Junya Watanabe/Comme des Garçons on their Autumn Winter Collection 2003-04. In 2004 Periton was commissioned to create works for the Channel 4 Television headquarters and is currently working on a project for the new Home Office building.
30 May - 07 July 2001: Cold Warmed Up
This new body of work forms a portrait gallery of famous and non-famous faces with complementary domestic pets. Within this motley crew, Iggy Pop masquerades as the Turin Shroud, the Dalai Lama melts into The Laughing Cavalier, and anonymous teenage girls in a photo-booth laughing for the camera are repeated in a Warholian grid. Popular imagery continues to serve as an inspiration, and by blending well known media subjects with the delicacy and intimacy of the cut paper form, Periton confounds our preconceptions and normal methods of response. Lord Lucan and Wallis Simpson become delicately pretty under his scalpel; familiar images of figures like Julie Burchill come to resemble heraldic standards.
28 June - 26 July 1997: Dandeliceum
In last year’s Popocultural exhibition at South London Gallery, Simon Periton’s 8 metre tall, fluorescent pink, paper doily gates dominated the room. The intricately patterned gates were a complex soup of graphic references from Christopher Dresser, Aubrey Beardsley, and the Poll Tax riots to the Sex Pistols. The equal measures of delicate handicraft, sophisticated appropriation, and anarchy reinvented the craft of the decorative, polite and somewhat staid doily.
The new doilies in this exhibition include 3-D metallic foil fountains that hang from the ceiling in the form of Chinese lanterns and incorporate images from Gothic German painting. The largest work in the show, a memorial target called Queen Victoria, is cut from the unaltered pattern of a commercially produced doily. By increasing the scale of this object and hanging it directly on the gallery wall, Periton questions the conventional division between decoration and painting.
Simon Periton is also exhibiting in Skinner’s Cage, 56 Turnmill Street, London EC1 from 30 June to 30 July 1997. The installation can be viewed from the street and is best seen after dark. Other work by Periton is included in the exhibition Lovecraft, currently at CCA in Glasgow, and in the British Council Window Gallery in Prague until 1 August 1997.