Exhibition Dates: March 3 – March 31, 2012
Opening Reception: Saturday, March 3 from 6 – 8 pm
Gallery Location: 434 Julia Street, New Orleans, LA 70130
Hours: Tuesday – Saturday, 10am – 5pm
Contact Info: 504.522.1999; www.arthurrogergallery.com
The Arthur Roger Gallery is pleased to present “Mosquito Muerto,” an exhibition of paintings and prints by Keith Perelli. The exhibition will be on view at Arthur Roger@434, located at 434 Julia Street, from March 3 – March 31, 2012. The gallery will host an opening reception Saturday, March 3 from 6-8 pm.
Mosquito Muerto, 2011. Mixed media, monotype and collage on paper. 78 x 67 inches.
In “Mosquito Muerto,” the recent series of large-scale paintings with monotype and collage by Keith Perelli, the artist seeks to expose our emotional defenses as a penetrable, raw façade of our psychological armor. The figures, painted as though from the inside out, have been rendered as stripped and dissected. They are woven into environments composed of tangles of flora, objects of antiquity and illusory abstraction.
Perelli recognizes the potential of using organic and man-made environmental detritus as both mark-making tools and objects in and of themselves. The dense collages feature the impressions of real plant material, found objects and the painter’s penchant for the abstract mark.
The free hanging tapestry-like quality of the collage paintings evokes the woven narrative-works produced in the mid-centuries. References to the art form and to antiquity can be noted in the poses and interaction of the figures. Suggestions of religious, mythological imagery and classic hunting scenes are present, although here the artist illustrates man being hunted by his own demons.
Keith Perelli is a native of New Orleans. He received his B.A. from the University of New Orleans and his M.F.A. from the University of Cincinnati. Keith Perelli has been the recipient of a SURDNA Foundation Art Teacher’s Fellowship and also fellowships from the Ratti Foundation and the Louisiana Division of the Arts. He currently teaches Drawing and Painting at the New Orleans Center for Creative Art. A mid-career survey of his work will be exhibited at the Alexandria Museum of Art in Louisiana in the summer of 2012.
For more information please contact the Arthur Roger Gallery at 504.522.1999 or visit our website at www.arthurrogergallery.com.