Fortuny
- 4-color screenprint on Kitakata
-
8 x 10 in
(20.32 x 25.4 cm)
- $800
- Serena Perrone
-
Available
Unframed: $800
Courtesy of Cade Tompkins Projects
"Fortuny" is an excerpt from the Ortensia Elettrica Series:
In this series I am thinking about backdrops, settings, and theatrical lighting. Using fine half-tone screenprints, I focus on proscenium-like scenes and framing devices created by plants and architecture, shadow and light. These images include not only real and miniature theater prosceniums, but are stemming from sites of drama in the past, from WWII bunkers on the islands in the Venetian lagoon, a walled courtyard in a convent, a wall against which a crime or a love story took place, and peripheral, abandoned and unknown sites laden with a past but with new stories superimposed - sites of hidden, illicit, and forgotten stories.Their mystery lies in their timelessness and the obfuscation of location, time, and even time of day. Plants illuminated by artificial lights confuse day and night, scale models confuse our sense of space. Inherently these spaces evoke a pang of nostalgia and become theatrical.The process of silkscreen dematerializes the space and re-composes it through the arrangement of transparent halftone dots - the layering required to recompose relates to the layering and repetition of history, and fragmented narratives that took place here - both hypothetically and in fact. The saturation of ink and its transparency relate to the veil of time and the permeability of truth and history - the space looks photorealistic - verisimilar, but in fact it is an extreme abstraction and approximation of the real place. The delicacy of the Kitakata paper and its tactile, luminous quality brings the hand-printed, post-digital image into contact with the real and timeless once again, and the build-up of ink layers gives weight to the paper and an almost velvety texture to the surface, like a flower petal, or skin. To understand the thousands of layered dots, the eye must ignore detail, let the facts of the process and material get blurred, suspend one’s disbelief. We blur our vision, engage in fantasy and are seduced by the image and richness of color in order to enter into this scene and project our own narratives upon these backdrops.
Artist Bio:
https://serenaperrone.com/home.html
https://www.cadetompkinsprojects.com/serena-perrone/
@serena_perrone_artist
Serena Perrone holds an M.F.A. from the Rhode Island School of Design and is currently the Assistant Professor of Printmaking (Tenure-Track) at Georgia State University. Recent solo exhibitions include Cade Tompkins Projects, Spring/Break Art Fair in New York, the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis and the Print Center in Philadelphia. Her work is collected by numerous institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and Philadelphia Museum of Art. She is the 2022 recipient of the Idea Capital Antinori Visual Artist Grant; a Pre-Tenure Scholarly Support Grant and a Welch Faculty Research Exchange Grant from Georgia State University, a Pollock-Krasner Grant, and was a Pew Fellowship nominee. A dual-citizen, she resides between the United States and Italy, where she maintains a studio practice and is the Founder and Director of Officina Stamperia del Notaio, an international artists' residency program in Sicily. In 2024, her work will be featured in a solo exhibition at Flatbed Press in Austin, Texas and in group exhibitions at Atlanta's Museum of Contemporary Art Georgia and the Michener Museum with the Center for Emerging Visual Artists in Philadelphia. She is represented by Cade Tompkins Projects.
Perrone’s multi-disciplinary work aims to foreground the importance of printmaking in the expanded field, supporting her dedication to the medium in her cross-disciplinary approaches to teaching. Personally significant landscapes and recurrent symbolic imagery become backdrops for instances of reflexive and restorative nostalgia, often referencing language, literature and visual conventions of the pre-cinema. Her narrative impulse and tendency toward ambivalent, theatrical scenes include the use of nature and architecture as framing devices resulting in work that takes cues from mythology, pre-cinema, traditional Sicilian puppet theater, tricks of perception and illusion, mirroring, portals, proscenium, the hidden and 'almost-seen', and notions of observation and control. She centers the familiar Sicilian landscape and its complex contradictions which serve a microcosmic purpose. As such, dualism has always been a factor that affects her perception of the world around her. Her imagery evidences her attraction to architecture, landscape and natural phenomena as metaphor. She is intrigued by the use of hidden and phenomenological elements in the art and architecture of the Baroque and this often informs her use of layered, mediated scenes that invite both furtive and explicit looking, relying heavily on process, workmanship, and decoration. By focusing on overlapping views and perspectives to evoke incongruous and anachronistic scenarios, she hints at narratives that center on the vernacular (both linguistic and architectural) whose mystery lies in the obfuscation of location and time. Problems of nostalgia, the role of invention and the insistence on an authentic vision concern her a lot and occupy an important place in her research which seeks to answer the question of how one can recognize and experience multiple genuine realities, simultaneously. A significant portion of the artist's work attempts to strike a chord between the universally-felt aspects of dislocation while centering the extremely personal experiences of being between cultures, as specific to her own lived experiences. These touch on narratives that are tied to socio-political conditions that have a ripple-effect onto the intimate domain of the private, familial and domestic, and lead the artist to seek out cause-and-effect relationships between one's culture, one's separation from or loss of culture, generational trauma and the residual effects of displacement upon immigrant families, recognizing the roles of discomfort, longing and nostalgia.
- Created: 2019