Dolmen, Sinfonia n.7

Magazzino is pleased to announce the second solo exhibition of works by Jorge Peris. Titled Dolmen, Sinfonia nr.7, the show features a body of work developed over the last four years and exhibited, for the first time in its entirety and complexity, in the gallery spaces.

The island of El Palmar, in the Natural Park de la Albufera in the vicinity of Valencia, is an ancient place, tied to millennial traditions, its life dictated by the relation with salt water constantly brushing the shores.

Four years ago Jorge Peris moved his studio here from Madrid, and since then his work has been following the pace and essence of the landscape, defined by sedimentation, stratification, and the action of time.

As in an expanded natural spectacle, the artist recovers the most diverse residues, channels them in his studio, where he materializes objects and creatures, subtracted from their transitory suspension.

In a sort of private system of reconstruction, Peris juxtaposes found stones, debris, ruins of architectural structures – both ancient and modern – in order to construct his poetical megaliths (Dolmen), with their graceful levity compensating the gravity and weight of their material of origin. And what nature releases to the artist is eviscerated, processed and combined into magical objects, with an undefined attitude of playfulness and fascination.

As in previous exhibitions (for instance, the 2010 exhibition Micro, Aureo, Adela at MACRO, Rome, or Tamaris at Château de Montbéliard in 2012), salt is a central element of the work, a precarious testimony of the subtle balance between form and the unformed, pure geometry and chaos.

Peris translates and imagines the individual trajectories of each object, from their initial submerged and inactive condition, to their initiation to a new artistic dimension, as in a sort of expanded chronological system.

The artist controls this process, as a complicit, arbiter and spectator, letting time and matter operate and sediment on the objects. Paradoxically this process does not seem to include death, although it is present and suggested throughout the work. The exhibition highlights an endless vital cycle; it is the description of a transition, the attaining of a new form that incarnates all the previous ones.