Many of Perejaume’s works seem to be an excursion around the edges of format, technique and language, making it impossible to be sure that we are observing the work in its totality. What we see is merely a shadow of the actual work in material form, with the work itself situated elsewhere. On the one hand, we feel the work exists only in the vaguest sense; on the other, it achieves a kind of ubiquity, appearing uncontrollably cultured, linguistic, sonorous. As if moved by a planetary wind, it has only been in the museum for an instant. What is left then is but a golden shadow of the work.
An extensive body of work is
illustrative of the way in which Perejaume has conceived most of his
exhibitions. The word ‘extensive’ is singularly appropriate because, from
the outset, they are organised with a view to producing spaces of
geographical collectivity that synchronise various locations and moments in
time. The idea of an interrelation between different surroundings gives rise
to a multiple succession of geographies, spaces and formats that are brought
into this relation. The work, or exhibition, thereby becomes too vast to be
taken in at a single glance. It has, therefore, to be traversed. The idea of
itinerancy is thus basic to understanding Perejaume’s way of intervening and
even of conceiving his work, in a sense that goes beyond the usual meaning
of the term. For Perejaume itinerancy is associated with a critical way of
understanding the exhibiting context, which is gradually extended until the
physical limits, the very walls of the gallery, acquire a territorial format
and scale.
Take, for example, the project Retrotabula, which takes place in four
separate locations: Vitoria, Granada, Sant Pol de Mar, and Brussels. In
Vitoria, Perejaume connects two different spaces: the Artium museum and the
mountain of Orixol. The mountain is crowned with a white circular wall that
adapts to the rugged terrain, the photographic record of which is presented
in the museum. The exhibition space itself is divided into four consecutive
rooms of different dimensions. The first shows works of various media,
including drawing, painting and photography. The second and third contain an
installation in which two powerful spots light a gold and a black crown. In
the final room, the wall from Orixol is reassembled. In Granada, a fragment
of the Sierra Nevada and the corner of a central city building are covered
with gold, the photographic documentation of which again being exhibited in
a gallery context (in this case, the Centro de Arte José Guerrero). In Sant
Pol de Mar, a golden net woven by Esther of Cal Negre is kept overnight in
the beach hut belonging to the town’s fishermen. In Brussels, the work
consists of a camera constructed of multiple lenses that is placed in the
garden of the Erasmus house.
In Retrotabula we see paintings that represent painted landscapes, with horizons that are frames. We walk through art galleries in which the works themselves are entitled ‘art galleries’, with paintings that frame art galleries seen from oblique perspectives, as though perhaps we were seeing the gallery in which we ourselves are standing through a continual aggregation of lenses. These images never appear just once or in a single format – they move, transform and reappear in other places, and in these displacements the works are altered slightly. It is as if an art gallery itself can be an altarpiece, within which a painting happens to be the partial representation of a slightly altered photograph entitled ‘altarpiece’, and in which another unframed painting represents the frame of a painting. If so, then the mountains that mark out the horizon of the territory where the art gallery is situated may be the frame of an altarpiece, or a framed landscape or an art gallery.
Perejaume establishes a connection between aura and altarpiece, due, perhaps, to the sonorous reverberation between the Catalan words au(r)a and re-(t)au(l)e. It could be that the aura in question is the halo of light around the head of a saint. Yet this is not Perejaume’s intended approach. Firstly, he puts forward the idea of the planetary extension of altarpieces: an immense, dense altarpiece that wholly embraces the planet, an atmospheric frame to encompass the Earth. There, at the solar eclipse, is the altarpiece that frames and the aura that crowns. This haloed absolute is the human head. The crown is the sun that sets behind the head, the cap-vespre (in Catalan, ‘evening’ and also ‘head-evening’), a sun-head that splits into a new symmetry: that of light and the human mind. The head as an artefact in which the light that enters through the eyes becomes thought. The thought that enlightens and names: a doubly illuminated world.
In Perejaume’s world, the golden crown is the sphere that frames thought, language and image. And if the aura is the light that illuminates and thinks, then the representation of things – including writing – is blackness, the absence of light, but also the cumulative sum of all the colours with which words return to the world. Gold and black summarise this constant duplication of the world, this continual moulding of reality: day and night, paper and writing, thought and object, empty and full, the painting and the frame. The mould anticipates the binary structure; it not only makes things fit together, it also allows them to be threaded together, to become entangled. The binary is the network: the nought and the one, the eye and the thread, the divine and the evil, the gold and the black. And the rest is casting nets and making altarpieces. Altarpieces are dictionaries, encyclopaedias and libraries. Altarpieces are newspapers that cast their nets over current affairs. Altarpieces are the typography on printing plates, in catalogues and exhibitions. They are the museums and cities, and the networks of roads, electricity lines, oil pipelines, railways, and telephone wires. Altarpieces are mountain ranges and rivers and plots of farmland and the political layout of borders.
In the work Gran emmarcatge (Aureolació ocular), 1998, Perejaume situates two golden spheres, four centimetres in diameter, slightly apart on a plinth. The title of the work is composed of two phrases, each offering a clear interpretation. One references the eyes and human sight, the other the frame and, despite the limitations of actual physical size, the enormous implications of the act of framing. Perhaps it has to be so big because it frames the eyes, the gaze, the images recorded on the retina, visual memory, the landscapes traced by the eyes. These may be the greatest treasures to be had: things seen, especially when the seer has crossed valleys, scaled mountains and descended rivers. These landscapes deserve a small gilt box at least.
However, it may also be that what these spheres frame is precisely what is apparently outside them. Let’s take as the space contained by the frame not the limited spherical space, four centimetres in diameter, but the space that begins on the other side of this skin. The spherical frame encloses the two spaces, inside and outside, with the same precision, allowing the equally correct interpretation that the spheres embrace the world. If the frame takes in the entire universe, it is immense.
Independently of whether the golden sphere frames one interior or the other, or, more exactly, both at the same time, it seems that the only de facto limit is the one that exists between our eyes and the world. Also, that our eyes are the mould of the world and, inversely, the world is the mould of our eyes. Two concentric spheres moving inside another moving sphere, the universe. This is a difficult image to get out of one’s mind: eyes like planets, turning and moving in a cosmic composition with the cranial sphere, the Earth and the other planets. As Blaise Pascal says, ‘Nature is an infinite sphere, whose centre is everywhere.’
Ivan Bercedo and Jorge Mestre were invited by Perejaume to write this text as part of the artist’s collaboration with contemporary