Juan Perdiguero, Marcia Wood Gallery, Atlanta - Canes

Juan Perdiguero: Canes
Marcia Wood Gallery, Atlanta
July 16 - August 14, 2004

Marcia Wood Gallery presents it’s first solo exhibition with Spanish artist, Juan Perdiguero. A Madrid native, Juan Perdiguero earned degrees in painting and art conservation in Spain and S.U.N.Y., Buffalo, NY, where he currently lives and works. He has lived in the U.S. and exhibited internationally for the past fourteen years. He had a solo exhibition in 2002 at the Atlanta College of Art Gallery.

The word “Can” is the Spanish zoological/ scientific name for dog (perro); “Canes” is the plural form and means dogs. As the title suggests, Juan Perdiguero’s paintings of mixed media on photo emulsion are renderings of dogs, primarily greyhounds. Larger than life size silhouette’s race around the gallery walls with a startling intensity. The animal’s form is cut out of the picture plane and mounted directly onto the gallery walls which unleashes the image from the traditional ground and creates a vivid frozen moment of action as the dogs seem on the verge of leaping off the wall and into the room. In translating his training and regard for Baroque painting into a contemporary practice of mixed media the artist adheres to the appreciable importance of the dramatic rendering of motion in Baroque art. As well, Baroque works are the opposite of minimal and often considered productions in themselves. Perdiguero has derived a complex process that relies heavily on chiaroscuro to define the 3-dimensional quality of the dogs. Using photographs of hounds, he draws the dogs’ contours on acetate and makes cutouts onto which he collages images of flowers, lichen and other organic material he has photographed. Each patch, a wide range of vibrating color, size, and depth is placed to describe the precise form of a dog in action. He then covers the image with etching ink and linseed oil which is then carefully wiped off - reductively drawing the dogs features. The resulting chiaroscuro effect defines the dogs musculature and features by pulling out the darks and using the underlying photographs that are uncovered as the lights.

Juan Perdiguero is interested in the duality of the dog’s animal nature and the human qualities that we project onto them as well as the instinctive, subconscious animal qualities that are a part of human psychology. The artist states, “The energy in this new work is shifting. The greyhounds are part of a larger universe of images where emotions are diverse, isolation and alienation coexist with nostalgia and with curiosity always threatened by a sense of vulnerability…they speak about the animalistic side so much a part of their nature (the one they project onto us so we acknowledge the inner animal that lives in us) but also of a subtle human quality ( the one we project on to them).”

MARCIA WOOD GALLERY
263 Walker Street, Atlanta, GA 30313
www.marciawoodgallery.com