As a conceptual realist, Perillo makes the perception and demystification of art historical styles a major part of the content of his works. Fabuler (after Sargent) and My Parents are Home entice us into viewing a portrait like a John Singer Sargent or a Caravaggio before upsetting our expectations. Other paintings suggest the posed format of fashion images and mass media glamour, which idealize the subject in specific, stylized ways.

Perillo uses realist styles with his own surprise details as ways to demystify the power they have over us. He creates seductive surfaces with luxurious and technically masterful finishes, and then compels us to see the limits of the style in a new conceptual frame.

In Allegory/Anti-allegory, the artist exhibits not only masterful skill in realist portraiture predominantly done from direct observation, but creates fantasy scenarios evolving from the dynamic between the artist and sitter. Often featuring an isolated figure, the moments in the paintings allude to private dramas and inner emotions not fully grasped by the viewer.

Contemporary figurative and photo-based art often vacillates between the poles of narrative and allegory--are we to view the images as a moment in a story whose before and after we can only imagine, or are we to view the images as signs of ideas beyond the figures in the material medium? Perillo gives us an opening for allegory--what there is to see is more than what you see--then challenges us to correct or complete our viewing with another perception.

Dreamy Dad exemplifies Perillo's approach in the exhibition. An imaginary father-figure depicted in high fashion style poses in a field of yellow flowers. Surrounding the figure are inverted images of Sargent paintings, rendered in the scale of art book reproductions. Here perception, recognition, familiarity, and reproduction are set in play in a work with fascinating conceptual challenges and provocations. Allegory/Anti-allegory illustrates how Perillo appropriates multiple visual languages and then makes them his own.

In Context

Perillo's extraordinary skill in styles of realism and the conceptual framing of figurative painting places him in the company of artists like Gerhard Richter, John Currin, and Elizabeth Peyton.

Richter has noted that today we're trained to see photographs as the real and paintings as artificial. Richter has made the perception of style and its negation a main theme of his career. Elizabeth Peyton is well-known for her stylized ironic take on fashion and celebrity images, and John Currin for pushing an old-master style over the edge to parody and the grotesque.

Artists working with realism for conceptual ends challenge us to re-view everything we see in a recognizable representational art genre. In today's image-saturated and post-Photoshop world, Perillo uses painting to heighten our awareness that styles, including those in photography, are clichés with their own history of accrued meanings and associations. Perillo knows that styles are spell-binding, and he engages realist styles to break their own spell. The works in this show cast a powerful spell of their own, and fully engage the viewer to participate in the making of their meaning.

About the Artist

Bruno Perillo lives in Brooklyn, NY and received his art education at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the New York Studio Program.