Diego Perrone, or Concerning Distortion
by Luca Cerizza  

From Diego Perrone edited by Luca Cerizza, Mousse Publishing, Milano 2021

“[…] despite the strangeness of his works, it is difficult… to challenge the simple truth of his art […]. What characterizes all his work is excess, excess in strength, excess in nervousness, the violence of expression […].”¹

To date, most of the interpretation of Diego Perrone’s work has focused above all on the contents of the images and the (micro) narratives that the artist has given the world, on the parade of bizarre creatures that populate his works: kings who laugh, manga characters that blush, old men and women holding animal horns; plus geese and mouflons in front of a camera, a well-known Italian comedian who strips completely naked, a dog at the brink of death, and more: deep holes dug into the ground, ears that are mutilated or shaped in different scales and materials and heads populated with tractors, fish, and other ears again. A rich collection of images and characters that stimulates a symbolic reading of his iconography. It is a fascinating critical exercise, which can drift into the areas of iconology and psychoanalysis, of narrative and sociology, and which I have in part practiced.² On the other hand, it is perhaps equally important to understand how and why these images and forms were produced and what, through these works, can be read of the artist’s relationship with himself, with the world and with other art being produced at the same time. For this reason, although aware of some necessary simplifications, I have chosen to circumscribe a large part of Perrone’s evolution within a single formal and conceptual category. Tracing a common sentiment through a large number of works, within the great variety of expressive means and formal methods adopted in these years (from photography to video and sculpture to drawing) as products of an attitude that one might call “post-medial”—typical of his generation—can help to stress the coherence of a path followed for twenty-five years. “Distortion” is the magic word that, together with its synonym “deformation,” the artist himself has given in more than one interview in relation to his work. And it is one that I would like to repeat here, almost to confirm the diagnosis of a disease, of an “infection” that penetrates the body and mind of many of his works, especially those produced in the last fifteen years. Defined by the Treccani dictionary as “displacement or deformation that causes an alteration of the shape or natural attitude,”³ the term is applicable to a variety of contexts ranging from medicine to mechanics, from optics to electro-acoustic and to music. For our discussion, “distortion” will be understood in a double sense: on the one hand as an “altered” approach to the characteristics and possibilities of a specific medium; on the other hand, as a linguistic expedient that applies to the visual aspect of the work. In the first case, it is characteristic of a methodological and mental nature; in the second of a formal, if not physical, nature.

Against the Medium

“[…] it is a constant deforming, distorting, from the beginning to the end, including the things you have thrown away. Starting from one point and coming to another, remaining rather at the mercy of the process you are practically inventing.”⁴

The first aspect—the distortion of expressive possibilities and specific techniques of a medium—has accompanied Perrone’s work since the early 2000s and is closely linked to a questioning of the status of the artist and his identity. As we have already observed, much of the first decade of his work “appears to be crossed by a continuous, albeit metaphorical, reflection on the reasons and possibilities of making art.”⁵ The “crowning” with a hen is perhaps the self-proclamation of exceptionality of the young man as an artist in his early days (the photograph Untitled, 1994). Asking Dario, his childhood friend, to build a hut of branches and leaves on the banks of a river and recording the fragility of thought and the uncertainties of the forces that guide his construction appears a celebration of the freedom to travel unconventional imaginative itineraries: a precarious monument to the artist’s ability to inhabit the world (the video La terra piatta è una dimensione lirica del luogo, come se regredire fosse inventare, The Flat Earth Is a Lyrical Dimension of the Place, as Though Regressing Were to Invent, 1999). Digging deep holes in the ground for a year in difficult climatic conditions, in an attempt to extract a void, is not only the aim to give physical evidence to an abstract thought but also a call to the artist’s responsibility: to justify ethically the sense of his creation through an enormous effort (the photographic series I pensatori di buchi, The Thinkers of Holes, 2002). Or again, old Totò who undresses until he is naked, in the darkness of a forest, not only embodies the desire of the old comedian to abandon the mask that has accompanied him throughout his career and present himself before the public in all his “moral” nakedness, in all his reality as an individual and a body: Totò also represents the artist tout court, his search for “truth” beyond any predetermined role (the video-animation Totò nudo, Naked Totò, 2005).⁶

And finally, the different shapes and images of ears scattered throughout Perrone’s work might not only demonstrate the obsession with the refined and complex architecture of the auricle (as stated by the artist himself) but could also be read as a tribute to the most famous ear in the history of art: the one that Vincent van Gogh deliberately mutilated in December 1888. That it was a sacrifice to the gods of art, an attempt to muffle an overly acute sensitivity, or perhaps the symbol of his uniqueness as artist is not known.⁷
These metaphors of the human condition in the guise of folktales were also forms of resistance by the artist to a globalized and high-energy modernity which, during the early years of his career and the historical period following the fall of the Berlin Wall, spread with increasing pervasiveness through increasingly uniform and seductive forms. Perrone was not only opposed to the falsity of that narrative and that promise of modernity but also to an idea—equally false—of considering art as a vehicle for communication without trauma. His resistance to this expressive uniformity also infected his way of dealing with the language of art, through a constant duel with the medium and its possibilities, in which the artist drastically distanced himself from any use in the (neo)modernist sense that was widespread in those years.
In this sense, La terra piatta is already a poetic declaration of the artist towards the medium, represented by the possibility of Dario (who embodies the artist but perhaps also the first man on Earth) to use material in an imaginative, amateurish, “other” way than the one suggested by convention: regress to invent. With the profound curiosity of the beginner, with the unconsciousness of the neophyte, Perrone questions the very instruments he chooses to use from time to time. “Let’s say that every time is a ‘small invention’: I try to use languages that I can potentially distort,⁸ in the sense that if, for example, I use a digital medium, a medium like 3D modelling, I try to use it a little by inventing a way to use it. I am interested in understanding the process, so I reinvent this process a little at a time: I and the people I work with then use the digital medium as if it were a saw or a hammer […].”⁹ 
Like the young protagonist of the episode “The Bell” in the Andrei Rublev film by Andrei Tarkovsky, who is wrongly believed to be the depositary of the knowledge necessary to ring the bells, Perrone claims to be able to make an object/work without knowing the technique and convinces the others (his collaborators) to follow him in a task guided solely by will and imagination.¹⁰ He forces the limits of the materials he uses through long and elaborate processes that also arise from his inexperience, and thus shifts expectations towards a certain medium and its expressive possibilities.
The results are often precisely the “distortions” of the medium used. Thus, for example, Vicino a Torino muore un cane vecchio (An Old Dog Dies near Turin, 2003) uses a digital medium not only to recreate artificially an event (the death of a dog) which he has never experienced but pushes a “modern” medium towards the recreation of a pictorial quality. More recently, the large glass works produced since 2013 arise from a condition of almost complete inexperience of that material that the artist decides to push to extreme technical possibilities while “remaining on the thin line of the feasible.”¹¹
The same glass works are sculptural volumes that seem to deny their own three-dimensionality, like the weight—in truth remarkable—of their presence, generating “an ambiguity between the sculptural mass and the image that is by its nature two-dimensional.”¹² These sculptures move drastically away from any complacency in the use of glass as a material shaped by blowing, as something malleable and light; rather they bring it back to its mineral state, its geological substance, almost as if the artist were sculpting it directly into the rock, or he were revealing the existence of a fossil. The diffuse spots of color on the transparent body of the sculpture achieved through partially random processes not only create results that are for the most part unexpected. Whichever way you look at them, these sculptures appear as lumps of colors suspended in mid-air (placed on the pedestal), inside which forms and motifs are almost always repeated equal to themselves: ears, koi carp, aircraft carriers, tractors:¹³ they are forms one can see through, but one does not know where to look; they do not create shadows: they are pure light, like very heavy holograms that are completely analog. As the artist himself claims, they are above all an artifact, an effect, a deception.¹⁴

This focus on the “effect” as a linguistic tool is not a recent thing and runs through Perrone’s work as a constant desire to bring his works to an “excessive” expressive level, to evade the limits of form and imagination. Already some works of the early 2000s presented themselves as “effects” prolonged beyond the conventional limits of language while at the same time as being experiments on their own terms, on their ability to contain sensations, feelings, emotions. The violence between children in the digital animation I verdi giorni (The Green Days, 2000) and the even more atrocious one between the two lovers Angela e Alfonso (Angela and Alfonso, 2002) lack any background and narrative justification: they are emotional climax devoid of plot, exasperation without apparent reason compressed in few minutes of action, like the last few minutes of the dog’s life before us. It is a sort of minimalism of the plot for a maximalism of the effect.

Artistically born in the early days of the internet and the ever-easier production and transmissibility of images, in 2000s, Perrone rebelled against their rapid and superficial use and consumption, the process of removal and anesthetization operated by modernity through different forms of entertainment. He did this by creating images and micronarratives that registered an embarrassment but that put the viewers themselves in a similar situation, confronted with “obscene” images because “constructed without any form of consolation, because stripped of every superfluous component, of every protection.”¹⁵ Perrone thus tested the ability of images to become a vehicle of emotion and truth, that of a religion of nature, of a pagan and fundamentally tragic faith.

De-Forming, Reforming

“I am interested in this deformation of the image of the mother.”¹⁶

That desire to make images and micro-narratives into the vehicle of a moral dimension seems to come apart in the following years. Faced with the apocalyptic spectacle produced by History (the Twin Towers, for example), Perrone must have gradually questioned the effectiveness of the art of producing images equally laden with truth and emotion. The effect of physical distortion, which is visible in many of his works for at least a decade now, therefore seems to be the consequence of a dissatisfaction with the communicative possibilities of the video and photographic image, of their iconic strength, perhaps the visualization of a complete inability of the image-form to condense so much emotion on the two-dimensional “skin” of the work. Under this pressure, the image-form becomes body, spatial presence. It becomes the vehicle for a new and more explicit expressionism.
If the photographs of the holes dug in the ground already seem to signal the need for an ethical justification for making art—as if producing images were no longer sufficient—this transition occurs more clearly with the subsequent works. Two sculptures aim to visualize the complex process that traditionally leads to the making of a bell, offering the three-dimensional image of its casting pit. In this case too, the artist embarks as a reckless neophyte into extremely—not to say irresponsible—enterprises and realizes his first sculptures in out-of-the-ordinary size using complex technical processes that he discovers gradually as he goes. While the first work in some way still retains a synthetic form, albeit of a “monstrous” organicity (La fusione della campana, The Casting of the Bell, 2005), the second is made even more clearly with the aim of unmasking the technical process dominating the final making of a bell: that kind of flower that seems to have blossomed at the “end” of the sculpture but which appears almost as an irrelevant detail in relation to the whole process (La fusione della campana, 2007). The “aerial” perspective (which overturns the form of the work by forty-five degrees) allows the vision of different phases of the process, so that the passage from one phase to another arrives at the evocation of a paysage, in direct continuity with I pensatori di buchi that are the conceptual premise of these works.¹⁷
With these two large sculptures—organisms-mechanisms-monsters that seem to have emerged from the earth—Perrone “dug” into the final shape of a bell to bring the process to light; he “extracted” his creation from an image, as though he had perceived that the stories and icons built up to that point could no longer sustain the high emotional weight they wished to convey, that their repetition would have made them lose their effectiveness.
While the two “bells” signal the beginning of a conflictual relationship with video and the photographic image, a slightly later work posits another relationship between the two-dimensional and three-dimensional form and, once again, the conscious hybridization between languages that covers Perrone’s work. The video Il primo papà gira in tondo con la sua ombra, la mamma piega il suo corpo cercando la forma, il secondo papà batte i pugni per terra (The First Dad Turns in Circles with His Shadow, the Mother Folds Her Body Looking for the Form, the Second Dad Beats His Fists on the Ground, 2006) resumes the “phase one” technique, typical of the early days of cinema animation, to recreate the atmosphere of an expressionist film, in which a family of strange creatures moves on an inclined plane. While the work speaks once again—albeit at a level of “monstrous” abstraction—of more or less dysfunctional family and emotional ties, it is also interesting to dwell on the attention that Perrone again shows for the size of the object, of the mise en scéne. The continuity with which the artist has used ramps to present his works in the two exhibitions in Bordeaux and Bologna,¹⁸ and adopted a similar inclined plane to move the characters of the Il primo papà video animation, seems to reveal the desire to create a scenic space within the exhibition context, a place where the bodies of the protagonists in the video are exposed, exhibited. As was the case for the animals shown in some early videos or for his friend Dario and his hut, once again Perrone observes behaviors in a state of “captivity” as a communication tool in a state of embarrassment.
On the other hand, while the “bells” aim to explore the object being represented, at the same time they also tend to impress, scare, persuade. The several forms of distortion adopted by Perrone will therefore be understood as intolerance for the limitations of media and forms, as an attempt physically to force the limits of thought, to create artificial effects for rhetorical purposes.

From this phase of his work, Perrone seems increasingly interested in adopting some communicative and formal expedients typical of Baroque art and translating them for his expressive needs. Thus, the distortions of the works made of plastic and the images of the sculptures between 2007 and 2008, the foreshortening views in the red biro drawings on paper, the hybridization between human and animal of the most recent wax helmets (2018) are just some demonstrations of that relationship with artifice, with the typical effect and expression of the Baroque and that would increasingly characterize his work. Perrone could subscribe to what Giulio Carlo Argan writes about that artistic age: “Art is the product of the imagination […]. Imagination is the overcoming of the limit: without imagination everything is small, closed, still, colorless.”¹⁹
From this moment, which retrospectively can be seen as a necessary sacrifice to the communicative and synthetic illusions of the image produced mechanically, Perrone broke off the use of video and photography to devote himself to media such as sculpture and drawing, in which manual intervention is more evident, and the images and materials are subjected to a distortion, to a forcing in a more directly physical and formal sense.
The sculptures created between 2007 and 2008 are built on a more direct relationship with the material, introducing a new violence that is transmitted to the images imprinted on them. Perrone seems to translate this uncertainty about the possibilities of the image through the use of the new printing and reproduction techniques that were then spreading. Having become an increasingly malleable and easily transportable material thanks to its digitization, the image can acquire a sculptural quality and, at the same time, change through its circulation and dispersion in a variety of different media.
Perrone follows this direction by taking some copyright-free images from the internet and printing them on white plastic which is then bent and supported by metal structures. On these violently distorted surfaces, the artist leaves marks traced out quickly in red biro pen: while he imparts a sense of speed and dexterity to a process that had also been mechanical (another rhetorical artifice?), this sign raises the degree of expressiveness of the work. Like a big pointed helix (La mamma di Boccioni in ambulanza, Boccioni’s Mother in an Ambulance, 2007), or like arrows pointing towards each other, as if to suggest a moment of extreme tension (Untitled (Lupi), Wolves, 2007), or even like big metallic insects, creatures emerged from some possible cyber-punk fiction that threateningly invade the exhibition space (Untitled (Mamuthones), 2007 and 2008), these sculptures seem to want to treat the images physically and, at the same time, give “body” to their subjects. On the other hand, the distortion on the materials leads to unpredictable results that suck up the image into the material eddies of the surface, where it seems to lose all its independence, to be transformed into decoration, accident, effect, the “skin” of a sculptural form. With an iconoclastic stance of expressionist violence, Perrone seems to manifest even more directly the crisis of the image and its communicative possibilities that he had already begun to signal with the “bells” of some years before.

This series of sculptures appears among the last, conflicting attempts by Perrone to keep alive some form of relationship with the mechanically produced image. From the following years, the artist began to produce his works through increasingly manual interventions, albeit occasionally in dialogue with experts in different techniques (as in the case of the glass sculptures). Perrone seems here to interpret a new attention on the part of contemporary artists to the use of techniques and materials that are as though abandoned for being considered obsolete (painting, bronze, and marble, for example), and a renewed taste for the “hand” of artist and for his technique, as a reaction also to the infinite possibilities of outsourcing and post production, and to the new demands of the market produced by the 2008 global economic crisis.
In this new artistic, social, and economic context, Perrone did not abandon himself to a nostalgic “return to order.” Even when he rediscovered manual skills and the use of traditional materials, he did not stop questioning and forcing the nature of the language adopted from time to time. Thus the early drawings (2009) are actually the product of manual interventions on photographic images, hybrid creatures that maintain a strong dialogue with sculpture. This developed into the red biro drawings on paper (2011), the first expressions of a vision of pure imagination realized through a totally manual process.
Perrone effects an even more evident distortion here, through which the artist’s face is modified and expanded as though it had passed through a digital morphing effect. With a patient manual process, the artist seems to want to convey the “liquidity” typical of digital matter, in yet another oxymoronic short-circuit between languages.

As we have seen, the “fantastic” imagery that Perrone brings to the fore through drawings and glass comes from the representation of himself. In this parade of self-portraits, two sets of works that “sample” two faces and two works by another artist are exceptions: the Italian sculptor Adolfo Wildt (1868–1931). Leaving aside any identification with the “monstrous” distortion of two Wildt sculptures, with their hybrid (Vittoria, Victoria, 1918–19) and grotesque nature (Maschera dell’idiota, Idiot’s Mask, 1918), typical of the imaginary of Perrone, the artist also seems interested here in provoking a dialectic between the linguistic possibilities of two expressive media. Perrone’s first quotation (Vittoria (Adolfo Wildt), 2013) uses a modern and synthetic material, PVC, to reproduce the extreme smoothness of Wildt’s treatment of marble and define yet another “stupefied” portrait. The second sample (Idiot’s Mask (Adolfo Wildt), 2013) uses the carved marble face, repainting it as an airbrush on another material, but leaving the flashes of the camera used to capture this image in the showcase in which the work was displayed, creating yet another short-circuits between three-dimensional and two-dimensional form. Moreover, the same airbrush technique immediately brings us back to the car and motorbike decorations, and to the use and effects made of them by defined cultural “tribes.” Once again Perrone blurs the boundaries between high and low culture, using a work of the past as a possible pop icon, the mask of a grotesque Italianness.
Furthermore, these series of works, like the glass ones that come immediately after, also demonstrate an interest in some artistic references doing from between the end of the first decades of the twentieth century in Italy, which Perrone has been exploring over the last decade.²⁰ Despite the diversity of the artists with whom he decides to establish a dialogue (Medardo Rosso, Adolfo Wildt, and Mario Sironi, for example), what unites their work—and what Perrone seems to identify with—is not only the ability to portray a suffering humanity, an extreme expressiveness through which to transmit the weight of their existences: it is also the ability to do so through linguistic experimentation and a technique that not only often forms a dialogue between sculpture and painting (think of the extremes of Rosso, a “pictorial” sculptor and Sironi, a “sculptural” painter), but is an instrument with which the artist creates artifice, effect, seduction.

The long parade of characters, portraits, masks that runs through almost the whole career of Perrone, starting from his self-portrait with/as an animal, ends for now with a new series of sculptures modelled in wax. The objectivity of a form that makes reference to a motorcycle helmet is associated with sampling from the natural and animal world (of pineapples, turtles, sea urchins) to occupy the position of the eyes, generating hybrid and monstrous creatures once again. Like faces caught in an expression of forced amazement or emotion, with mouths and ears wide open to the world, these masks look like emoticons produced by an archaic civilization. Yet another short-circuit between iconographic modernity and formal archaism, these works once again give physical evidence to an image and an emotion. More, the very etymology of “Emoticon” (emotion + icon), two objectives towards which, as we have seen, much of Perrone’s work has moved up to today—the transmission of an emotion through images—are merged. While the kings smiled discreetly, the manga characters blushed with modesty, the two lovers mutilated a sensory organ to limit their feelings, here the emotion is that conveyed synthetically using digital communication. While the passage from the use of video and photography to sculpture signaled a certain lack of distrust in the capacity of the two-dimensional image, these works seem to translate the need, typical of digital reality, for an increasingly simplified, synthetic, “primitive” communication. These faces with deformed, excessive, grotesque expressions are the last stupefied creatures of a parade lasting twenty-five years. They are the umpteenth distortion that runs through the thinking and form of Perrone’s work, the last artifice to tell, once again, the truth.

1. George-Albert Aurier on Vincent van Gogh, in Vincent van Gogh, Lettere a Theo (Parma: Ugo Guanda Editore, 1984), 366.
2. Luca Cerizza, “Troppo strano per morire. Movimento in tre parti e comunque incompleto su Diego Perrone,” in La mamma di Boccioni in ambulanza e la fusione della campana, exh. cat. Bordeaux: CAPC, 2007/Bologna: MAMbo, 2007–08 (Milan: Skira, 2007).
3. http://www.treccani.it/vocabolario/distorsione
4. Diego Perrone, “Tre cose in fila in salita,” conversation with Charlotte Laubard and Andrea Viliani, in La mamma di Boccioni in ambulanza e la fusione della campana, 21.
5. Cerizza, “Troppo strano per morire,” 139.
6. Another work dating from shortly before but similar in many ways (the video-animation Vicino a Torino muore un cane vecchio, An Old Dog Dies near Turin, 2003) was originally intended to depict the death of an old artist and not that of a dog, as Perrone himself stated. (In this publication on p. 92).
7. Florence Derieux noted the possible relationship with Vincent van Gogh: “In conversazione con Diego Perrone,” in Diego Perrone. Sculture di vetro/Glass Sculptures, exh. cat. Sussi e Biribissi, Bari: Spazio Murat, 2017 (Bari: Comune di Bari, 2017), n.p.
8. Emphasis mine.
9. Perrone, “Tre cose in fila in salita,” 18–21.
10. By the artist’s own admission, that episode underlies the photographic series entitled I pensatori di buchi (The Thinkers of Holes, 2002) and sculptures called La fusione della campana (The Casting of the Bell, 2005 and 2007). It should be borne in mind too that Tarkovsky’s entire film is a profound reflection on the ethical, political, and social motivations underlying making art. The fact that, in one of the earliest scenes of the episode, the young protagonist Boris is shot next to a hen, makes the identification with Perrone even more plausible.
11. Diego Perrone interviewed by Charlotte Laubard, “Diego Perrone: Self Portraits and Herbivorous Carnivorous,” moussemagazine.it, http://moussemagazine.it/diego-perrone-selfportraits-herbivorous-carnivorous-casey-kaplan-new-yorkmassimo-de-carlo-milan-2017/ (In this publication on p. 196).
12. Ibid.
13. One might go so far as to say that some iconographic motifs that persistently recur in Perrone’s work and repeatedly and more continually so in the latest series of works such as the drawings and glass are used by the artist in the same way that Paul Cézanne used apples and pears, or Giorgio Morandi jars and bottles: as tools for a linguistic experience/experiment, rather than for their content value. This consideration relates to the premises and the interpretative line of this text. On the other hand, the same repetition of certain iconographic motifs could be read as a product of a psychotic drift. The philosopher Karl Jaspers has noticed how, following his illness, the mannerisms increase in Vincent van Gogh’s work (“for example the numerous cypress paintings with their rich and infinite movement”), Vincent van Gogh, in Lettere a Theo, 23.
14. Moreover, distortion is just that. In musical language, in electronic music as in rock, the distortion pedal is one of the possible devices called “effects” that are used to modify the signal originating from the instrument. It is an “effect” that serves to give different quality to the sound of the instrument or voice.
15. Cerizza, “Troppo strano per morire,” 138.
16. Perrone, “Tre cose in fila in salita,” 27.
17. A few years later, the sculpture entitled Pendio piovoso frusta la lingua (Rainy Slope Whips the Tongue, 2010) provided another and more direct attempt to give a sculptural, “monstrous” form to the experience of a landscape.
18. See note 2.
19. Giulio Carlo Argan, Storia dell’arte italiana (Florence: Sansoni, 1968), vol. 3, 258.
20. This happens in perfect consonance with a more widespread re-reading of some moments of twentieth-century Italian artistic historiography, especially with respect to the theme of the communication of the work through the technical means of reproduction. Consider, for example, the essay by Paola Mola, Rosso. La forma instabile (Milan: Skira, 2007) on the use of photography by the sculptor.