London-based artist Peter Peri draws inspiration from European Modernism, literature and popular science fiction, creating pared-down geometric compositions that seem to conjure other worlds. His grandfather Laszlo Péri was a well-known Constructivist who emigrated from Hungary to Britain. Infanta, painted just two years after Peri’s graduation from Chelsea College of Art, combines this influence with an even earlier source. ‘I’m very interested in the roots of early Modernism, Suprematism, Dada/Constructivism’, he explains. ‘All the elements which were used to fill the gap left by the absence of the figure, e.g. the allusion to tradition as validation in compositional rigor, political commitment, the pseudo science of people like Pyotr Ouspensky concerned with higher knowledge, the 4th dimension etc.; and in the anxiety involved in that, the excess of stuff that gets poured into the sparseness of geometric abstraction. There’s something psychologically painful about looking at all that effort towards human advancement that was lumbered onto abstraction from where we are today. The pattern of the balls in this painting reminded me of Velasquez portraits of the Infanta. I liked the idea of them as desolate units forming into an absurd representation of a figure.’ Peri’s work is held in institutions including Tate, London and the Kunsthalle Basel, where he has also mounted solo exhibitions.
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