Nada existe en estado puro ni tampoco en absoluta quietud, sino en una continua transformación. MAESTRO JOSE PERDOMO! Jose Perdomo: Celestial Gardens Jose Perdomo, one of the leading lights of Dominican artists, is a painter who derives his style from abstraction in nature. It is often said that figuration exists in abstraction, in the sense that the artist finds a correlation between idealized forms and the experience of nature. In Perdomo’s case, this is particularly true—we see him working with organic abstraction and finding a structure that belongs to the outside world, much in the way Arshile Gorky and Arthur Dove did as pioneering American modernists; we also recall that during his time in New York City, he worked with Robert Motherwell and Willem de Kooning. Perdomo’s creations are also innovative, and structurally of high interest; his work creates a dialogue between the gestural abstraction of the New York School and his own highly developed, and somewhat abstracted, language of flowers and foliage. In fact, Perdomo’s paintings amuse and celebrate life forces that might otherwise go unrecognized. Maintaining his integrity as an artist, Perdomo seeks a vital language of his own, whereby flowers and other natural imagery inspire his concepts—in recent years, his debt to nature has become increasingly clear. From his earliest work to his latest, the artist has been attracted to the place and power of shapes originating in the real world—even as he does a masterful job of rendering it in partly objective terms. There is also an abiding commitment to abstraction on Perdomo’s part, which gives his oeuvre an intensity not easily found in contemporary art. Nonetheless, it is most accurate to see his work as examples of nature in flux, its meaningful imagery becoming a kind of process whereby something of the world’s workings is learned. In Perdomo’s case, we have a clear insight into where he finds inspiration; one has only to look at the lush foliage and flowers of his garden to see how he has committed himself to abstractly interpreting nature in light of the achievements of modernism. If we consider the works of Dove and Gorky, we find that there is a similar tension in Perdomo’s art, whereby the artist imitates but also transforms the forms before him; indeed, the latter’s spectrum can range from outright quotations of the shapes of flowers to highly abstract imagery whose idealizations remain true to art rather than to the outside world. At the same time, there is tremendous depth to Perdomo’s art; and there is a personal reason for this: one of his children, a son, is autistic. His condition is of course a source of pain for the artist, who is particularly close to his child. It is difficult to register tragic emotion in compositions that are based on the New York School and abstraction in nature, yet this is exactly what Perdomo has done. In light of Perdomo’s achievement, we find that his skills beautifully balance a sense of nature as an archive of forms with the styles achieved by the abstract painters in America during the 1940s and ‘50s (Perdomo spent time in New York during the mid-1960s). Color clearly means a lot to him, just as a free-flowing sense of style is central to his concerns. As he is now a mature artist, Perdom belongs to that group of talented painters who have found in organic abstraction the means to speak of transcendence, even sublimity. And his recent turn to a more figurative reading of nature allows him to take obvious visual pleasure in his treatment of the vast range of flowers, trees, and plants that literally threaten to overtake his back yard, where the lushness of the tropics is easily found and experienced. At the same time, there is something essentially serious about Perdomo’s oeuvre, which communicates more than the attractiveness of what he sees. The sense of commitment in his art is based upon a deep understanding of theme that may be seen as spiritual, even when he is experimenting—for example, his work is stylistically varied during the 1970s, but the imagery leans a bit in the direction of unseen places and new horizons. The classical music of twentieth-century composers—Schoenberg, Bartok, Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Stravinsky, and Mahler are certain positive influences that Perdomo strives to inscribe in his art. Perhaps music’s depth, along with the imagery of his garden, gives his work its otherworldly aura, its preoccupation with an unspoken sublime. It is the painter’s job to be truthful to his artistic nature; he must do the best to render what he feels or sees. In the most recent works Perdomo finds solace in paintings of birds and leaves in densely painted approximations of actual natural activities. In one work, the birds fly among foliage of different colors: orange, yellow, green, and dark blue. The birds punctuate the composition beautifully as they fly in different directions, and as a result one can see a kind of pattern superimposed on the individual leaves, which also form a design. The sense of order is central to Perdomo’s sensibility, which finds a grand unity in the smallest examples of nature. In another recent painting, we encounter colorful blossoms whose innate qualities are given a melancholy turn by the presence of crowns of thorns. Now it would be unfair to box the artist in by calling him pious; nevertheless, there is the presence of the wreaths of thorns, surely an allusion to Christ in a Catholic country such as the Dominican Republic. But more than mere reference, the imagery becomes a visionary treatment of God’s relations with nature, even though Perdomo is choosing to include emblems of Christ’s suffering rather than his symbols of his joy. The image of the crowns may also indicate the struggle to raise an autistic child. The reminder of Christ’s tragic presence in the midst of flowers continues to inspire Perdomo’s viewers, who welcome the inclusion of depth as a way of expanding and underscoring nature’s relations with the human spirit. The unseen existence of the Christ figure echoes the unknown presence of Perdomo, whose work casts off the easy egotism of recognizable authorship in the form, say, of a self-portrait or the repetition of a unique style. Clearly, in this painting and others, we find an artist in search of the ineffable; Perdomo makes it clear that his preoccupations begin with a particular style but are meant to move beyond style into an area of spiritual speculation. What we take from his contemplative art is pretty much up to us; there is no sense that Perdomo is communicating doctrinal truths meant to be learned as catechisms. Instead, the artist finds the world to be a beautiful but complicated place, where sadness is just as accurate as delight as a concomitant of nature. His message, more emotional than intellectual, colorful and probing, is clear. Jonathan Goodman
Posted on: Wed, 26 Nov 2014 23:07:57 +0000
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