A Mozart light pervades and illuminates these admirable portraits of the Rembrandt’s self-portraits, which our gallery has the pleasure to testify. The joyous hand of Pericoli plays with shapes and colors: around a famous face, he unstitches and sews up again air’s threads, sky’s shades, clouds textures, he tears apart and repairs rainbow’s silk, with mastery, lightness and grace. Through the colored mind of a new Hermes, his brush and his pencil have rediscovered the highest value of doing as techné, of art as a parody: in its most noble sense, which belongs to Ancient Greece: the re-proposal and the variation of an archetype, an absolute model: nothing is created, nothing is destroyed, but everything transforms. So we witness a rich, happy metamorphosis: to Rembrandt’s slow melancholy, to his thoughtful chronological clepsydra, to his magmatic reflections of ivory and mustard, black and gold, and to his dark toll of bronze, Pericoli opposes an enchanting crystalline music, a tissue of lights in an ampulla of transparences, a solidifying breeze of happy sounds of flutes, of blue Aeolian harps, of delicate though faraway drums. The grievous paste of the traditional pigment, in these new paintings, is transformed in a dance of lines, a geometry of confetti, an arabesque of signs weaved in thin air, where the great model of incision becomes guide and ornament, theme and variation. The pensive man from the North, the austere contemplator of Time’s sickle, the Brahman testimony of the organic decadence, was replaced by the dream of Greece, by the games of Hermes, by the subtle raveliane alchemies, by the solar iridescences of the invisible vapors of the sea, by the blinding reflections of the Mediterranean light.
Text by Paolo Repetto, translation by Fay Ledvinka