ROME.- Laid out as a vertiginous landscape, Diego Perrone’s exhibition at MACRO – Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome brings together 20 years of the Italian artist’s multi-media output as well as five new works in the form of two work/displays, a distortion of the space, a video and a photographic series. Formally slippery and at times hypnotic, the artist’s work amplifies and exasperates images and gestures to explore the extremes of “moments” in time and of the nature of the materials he chooses to employ. In this way there is an attempt to create images out of absences, working with archetypes and with the stuff of dreams. The title of the show, which translates to Rainy slope that whips the tongue offers a glimpse onto how Perrone looks at the world.




The exhibition is seamlessly divided into different constellations of works, each one narrated by descriptions written by the artist; some, such as the red-biro drawings and the glass sculptures, are exhibited for the first time on newly conceived support structures which are meant to be read as works in their own right. One of these, Snorkeller Tube, was realized thanks to the support of the public notice PAC2020 – Piano per l’Arte Contemporanea promoted by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture. A new video work, Frustata, is made of old footage recorded by Perrone and captures a chance encounter, in a Northern Italian mountain village, with a boy who masterfully cracks a whip. The work echoes throughout the space, with the sound of the cracking of the whip acting as a thread that connects all the works in the exhibition. A spatial intervention, x Meters Slope, in which Perrone has chosen to sink the walls onto the floor, performs a similar unifying gesture, re-enforcing the artist’s intention to make the entire exhibition a work of art.

In exploring the moment in-between before and after, which is often treated as the “dead time” between cause and effect, the artist toys with our gut response and we are left asking ourselves what (just) happened? For example, the death of an old dog in a wood near Turin is not a news item, yet to Perrone it is an event worth conceiving and fleshing out over the course of a five minute video—Vicino a Torino muore un cane vecchio—employing CGI technologies of the early 2000s.

Driven by a curiosity for hidden places as well as for the depths of human psyche, Perrone will dig deep also to discover/unearth his own intentions. The world (above) looks, feels and sounds different from below ground as well as from under water, through the intricate web of a red-biro drawing, or from within a crooked room. It makes sense in other ways as suggested by the series I pensatori di buchi. Therefore, in pushing materials beyond their cultural and organic viscera, Perrone constructs a parallel world that pulls both marginal and iconic elements from the real one. He overlaps and draws lines between disparate disciplinary languages and between the natural and the man-made to deviate the viewers’ understanding of time and place. With Pendio piovoso frusta la lingua, Diego Perrone continues to explore the limits of skewed inventiveness through a total work of art that insinuates itself perfectly into the grooves of a vision disquieted by the technological developments of the last thirty years and their repercussions, yet it asks questions that surpass temporal boundaries. The work, Snorkeller Tube, is a winner of the public notice PAC2020 - Piano per l’Arte Contemporanea, promoted by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture, designated for the contemporary art collections of the Capitoline Superintendency for Cultural Heritage.

Diego Perrone (Asti, Italy, 1970) is a multi-media artist living and working between Milan and Asti. Perrone's work in photography, film, and sculpture is characterized by technical and material experimentation and draws from and expands upon the history of twentieth-century Italian art movements, toying with symbols of Italian popular culture. Solo exhibitions of Perrone's work have been held in several institutions and galleries including Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin (2005), Museo d'Arte Moderna di Bologna (2007), Fondazione Brodbeck in Catania (2010), Museion in Bolzano (2013). Perrone has participated in numerous group exhibitions including shows at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, Palazzo Grassi in Venice, Galleria d’Arte Moderna in Turin, the Kunstmuseum St. Gallen in Switzerland and Castello di Rivoli in Turin. In 2021 he was awarded the ACACIA Award hosted by the Museo Del Novecento in Milan and in 2007 he received the The Fondazione Spinola Banna per L'Arte award. His work has also been included in the Venice Biennale (2003) and at the Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art (2006).