Jorge Perianes
Hallucinations
Jorge Perianes, with his new solo show at Max Estrella, demonstrates once again his remarkable talent as artist and poet to pose questions that challenge our perception of the world, and often our own identity.
Jorge Perianes’ starting points for Alucinaciones are his recent and profound readings of neuroscience and psychiatry –in fact, the exhibition takes its title from one of these readings, particularly from Oliver Sacks. The artist reflects on artificiality, mental reconstruction, reification, and the transitory as our defective coping mechanisms for digesting and judging reality. Since the end of World War II (postmodernism), we perceive reality in a more fragmented, incomplete, discontinuous and chaotic way. The discourses fall apart at the same time as our attention span, and our drill-down and connection capacities.
The brain analyses the external world though our senses, but senses fragment reality’s attributes in order to analyze it. Despite this fragmentation of external reality, we have a unified representation of it inside our brain. One of the most interesting questions in neuroscience is how the brain achieves this perceptual unity. In other words, how it knits together a fragmented image to generate a coherent one. This precise moment, known as link or connection, is what Jorge Perianes’ work captures. Alucinaciones refers to perception traps and how the brain corrects and reconstructs the incomplete in an incredible, and even hallucinatory, way.
Furthermore, our increasing sensory deprivations taken to the extreme can produce deceitful perceptions and derive, among other neurosis, into polyopia –the viewing of multiple images in presence of one sole object- or palinopsia –the recurring perception of images after the disappearance of the visual stimulus that generated them. “I am interested in this failed judgment, these illusions that substitute reality. When a fragment appears (always on my works), how the mind reinterprets it; this interests me from the perception of the artwork point of view. Observing how the irrational persists and grows strong, and how the rational succumbs as a result of being questioned from a thousand fronts.”
We see with the brain, not the eyes, thus it is important to analyze the base that the brain uses to invent elements, which motors does it use, and what is the why and how of the way it interprets reality. These quintessentially scientific inquiries are addressed by Perianes from his artistic practice; resulting in the search of a possible structure and a positive discourse, in which distant symbols –classically and poetically- unify in order to seek new meanings or outlets into the world. “In this regard, I come a bit from surrealism, yet without its radical desire of transformation and rupture; I am not as ambitious or naïve. I search for poetry, I speak of being”.
The gallery’s central wall multiplies and each new structure disintegrates and deteriorates; and, in spite of this decadence, among its holes and deformities some artworks and sketches emerge, just as the capitalist system incredibly adapts itself and -in a liquid form- infiltrates interstices and occupies spaces in an organic and natural way. “I am interested in capitalism as an extremely sly and astute construction, plus a coherent one (I am not entirely against it, but its essence of speed and death worries me)”.
The only way of facing this terrible truth, this decadence and pathology, is through poetry. In the words of David Barro: “Jorge Perianes relies on fable, and all the more on poetry; as he knows that the spectator’s process of apprehension will be easier than baring with the naked and fleshless truth”.
