Prepare to get in a Scramble just in time for the New Year. At the dA Center for the Arts in Pomona through January 2nd, artist Atilio Pernisco offers a mysterious and dreamy collection of works that are as layered and edgy as they are beautiful.
According to Pernisco, the exhibition is a culmination of ten years of work that represents his response to “the strange in the familiar while living in suburban LA. These were gestural, wet on wet, very painterly.” The works he created for Scramble began during the first period of the COVID-19 pandemic and he says used limited materials. His source was “a bank of personal images and digital references of a more universal relevance in order to paint.”
The chaotic beginning of pandemic times and the charged political climate were both incorporated into this body of work. Pernisco notes “I was trying to make sense of these absurd times by contemplating a narrative from a collage of images and reorganizing thoughts to paint.”
Many of these images come from cell phone photos that the artist took, using them as some painters draw. “I consider the cell phone photograph as a way of making a sketch. I need a couple of photographs to establish some kind of association, making a collage of images…Just as in dreams, where the images have symbolic power and keep coming back, the photographs on the floor in the studio are mixed and re-contextualized with each juxtaposition…I use the initial image as a pretext to experiment formally. The image is the origin, painting is the action of matter over representation.”
Impressively, he created more than 55 works, including paintings, drawings, and monotypes as he tried to make sense of the chaos and express the inchoate thoughts of this time period. He says he was “painting by reorganizing sort of pictorial sentences by adding and subtracting paint on canvas.”
The process worked elegantly, producing rewarding, thought-provoking works that are a landscape into the mind and soul as well as the physical world. The exhibition reflects the artist’s belief that “Painting is where materiality and immateriality mix—the mind and the body, the rational and the irrational.”
In many of the works, Pernisco makes marks on the canvasses, that could appear as if they were scratches from another dimension or an underworld. He says the process of mark-making is usually a response to the last mark for him. “Usually, I start with the drawing of the image I want to make, sometimes the canvas has some strikes of colors. Later I render areas and I erase faces, arms.”
The result is something that mixes real and surreal in an evocative, immersive flow. He describes the process as that between “Memory as the image, and experience of the moment now – paint stains. The painting surface fluxes between figurative and abstraction at times. [In this] way I’m trying to create poetic associations between colors and textures using intentionality and chance.” In other words, much like in life itself, his images coalesce and shift between the unexpected and the planned. The paintings also reflect a sense of immediacy and imminent possibilities to the viewer.
Pernisco wants viewers to bring their own interpretations and connections to his work, reacting in the most personal manner possible to the paintings. But the images also have a universal, even classical feel in terms of approach, even when deep in surrealism. They exhibit a true sense of place, even if that place does not seem entirely recognizable. Pernisco says the images “delve between two places: childhood memories of Buenos Aires, Argentina and adult life living in Los Angeles.” He adds that each work juxtaposes fiction and reality and blurs the thin line between them.
In his Pomona exhibition, Pernisco exhibits several different mediums. While his painting is what he says best expresses his work as an artist, at times he needed a break, drew some larger works using charcoals as well as creating monotypes with a small press. “These monotypes influenced the later paintings and began using a monochromatic palette, a painterly execution.”
Scramble appears to represent a vital interior landscape of the mind and soul. Pernisco explains “These [paintings] are poetic gestures, a possibility of a new language perhaps…[of] the mind, the memories, the stories told. All that is the perfect brew to experience a new sensation perhaps. I’m in search of the experiential aspect of painting, its poetic distortion of a stroke, of a certain speed, an omission of a torso.”
In each of his paintings there is always a tension between something that has just occurred, is currently happening, or about to take place. Some of that visual tension arises from the fact that whatever is leading to that event, or caused it, is kept hidden from the narrative of his art. There is a sense of imminent revelation, even anticipation, but that is for each individual viewer to determine for themselves.
Pernisco’s mix of narrative, his combined use of figurative painting and abstraction/elements of the surreal take viewers into a world as rich and strange as a dream but more rooted in the collective, material consciousness. The title of the exhibition serves as its description, referring in part to the diversity of the works, mediums, the figurative characters’ states of mind, and the artist explains, his own. “Scramble can mean to construct or deconstruct… my state of mind between fiction and reality…past and present and all the untold stories in between.”
The dA Center for the Arts is located at 252-D, S. Main Street in Pomona. To schedule a visit, go to www.dacenter.org. The closing event for Scramble will be January 2nd from 3-6 p.m.
Pernisco will also have work featured in an upcoming exhibition Momentous Occasions, an exhibition of six figurative painters, at Durden and Ray at the Bendix Building, with an opening reception on January 8th. Durden and Ray is located at 1206 Maple Ave., #832 Los Angeles, CA 90015