Untitled 1987

Jules Perahim made this untitled work with paint, creating these strange, silhouette-like figures. There’s this almost ghostly quality to the work; I imagine Perahim swirling the greyscale paint, seeing what shapes emerge, and letting his imagination run wild. A figure sits like a kind of tea pot with legs, while another bows or stumbles beside them. These aren’t quite human, and not quite machine; maybe an alien from another world? The background is marbled, the paint seems thin and watery, allowed to bleed and flow across the surface. I wonder what Perahim was thinking when he made this? Surrealism was big at the time, and the way these forms come out of the subconscious reminds me of Miró or Ernst. All of them were figuring out what a painting could be, and pushing the boundaries of figuration. It's all part of a conversation, and as painters, we keep talking to each other across time.