Praz-Delavallade LA presents In a Forgotten Tongue, a solo exhibition by Mattea Perrotta. This is the artist’s first exhibition with the gallery. The opening art party took place on Saturday May 20, 2023. The exhibition will run through June 24 2023.
About the Exhibition
To speak does not mean to be heard or understood or believed. Each time a word leaves our lips, not yet audible but partially formed in the way our tongue moves/pushes it outward, our mouth becomes a threshold into vulnerability. There is risk in speaking as there is risk in not. It is impossible: language. The magic of the mundane that holds the power to both bring humanity together as well as divide it.
To express then becomes an attempt of sublimation; an act of transformation from thought into word, akin to line into letter, color into shape, edge into limit, soft into hard, and abstract into figure. Therefore it is an ongoing translation in search for meaning or a proximity to it.
As philosopher, literary critic, semiotician, psychoanalyst, feminist, and, most recently, novelist, Julia Kristeva writes: “Art, literature, painting, music: the imaginary. Such is the privileged utterance which restores to language as a system of communication the sublimatory dynamic that constitutes it and which continuously works through it, even in cases of the most severe inhibitions and devastating anxieties”
About Mattea Perrott
Perrotta’s work teeters between abstraction and figuration. And at times are held in baroque backgrounds of chiaroscuro cloud formations or by deep, endless black bases. Conscious dramatization, not to distract from, but to emphasize the urgency. This is an under-recognized reasoning behind baroque art such as in Artemisia Gentileschi’s work. However, in Perrotta’s case listening is the priority. This is done to make oneself clear amidst a sea of voices.
Shapes in a soft palette, with cubist references, characteristic of Perrotta’s oeuvre, are pieced together into imagery of geometric fields that now and then take on human characteristics. Hard lines remain to distinguish each shape, each voice from the other. The contradiction of baroque and cubist perspectives–– an ongoing overlap of viewpoints versus all viewpoints visible at once––combined in single works to bring a surprising clarity to the omnipresent multitude that forms the fabric of life.
CLICK HERE to find out more about past exhibitions for this gallery
On View: May 20, 2023 – June 24, 2023
What: In a Forgotten Tongue, Mattea Perrotta
Where: Praz-Delavallade Los Angeles, 6150 Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles CA 90048
Website: https://www.praz-delavallade.com/
