Pat Perry. The House You Came From

Dorothy Circus Gallery proudly presents “The house you came from”, a series of selected drawings from 2012 until 2016 by the Michigan based artist Pat Perry in what will be his debut solo exhibition in Europe.
Often described as an “adventurer”, Pat Perry, coveted by art galleries and collectors, is an artist from Grand Rapids, Michigan, currently based in Detroit, who writes and makes pictures working itinerantly both with paintings and illustrations through careful and cautious observation. He crisscrosses the country, documenting his travels through art, whether sketching a waitress in a diner or photographing a field through a window. As a matter of fact, the lands of the North, colourful people, music, and the ordinary streets of the Midwest inspire him a lot for his works. The results of thousands miles of risqué travelling and several rolls of film later, paint a unique and romantic portrait of some of the characters of the American West.
While creating both paintings and drawings and travelling through the US to exhibit his works, Pat Perry is always ready to listen and learn from the world he lives in. His portfolio includes everything from editorial illustrations for the New York Times and Atlantic Records to the hand-assembled book Drawings about Black Holes, now in its second small printing, published by Issue Press in Grand Rapids.
Perry’s works are highly evocative and stimulate the viewers’ imagination by hinting at the secret lives of their subjects, which remain fascinatingly mysterious. He knows and loves the monuments, scars, and soil of the USA in a way that can't be faked. Through his need to chronicle “jumping from here to there” Perry has invented or perhaps rediscovered a way of seeing that appeared lost. His simple silhouettes of people, inspired by traditional portraiture, are filled with rich and textured stories that seem to be representative of dreamlike memories, telling us a lot about the subjects, where they live and what they like.
His work can only be described as an eclectic and dreamy mix of mediums, pensive philosophical concepts and painstakingly detailed and complex pieces. “And I sketch in journals because I want to keep making art and that is all I can fit in my backpack” Perry says. His journals are filled with sketches and writings, full-blown drawings, and quick studies of the people and objects that move him while he is on the move. Filled with a mélange of images, all drawn with a black Bic pen, the journals feel like a ultra-realistic travelogue not only of the places he has visited, but also of his mind. He is good at the quotidian—a guy riding his bike, a family waiting for a train—but he then turns them into haunting, harrowing, human narratives. He wants to make paintings that just softly whisper to us the thing that we forgot.
When speaking of his work, the artist says: “I just like thinking about my own work as a Journalistic type of tool; one I can use as spotlight. It makes sense to me that if you are lucky enough to be graced with one of those spotlights or magnifying glasses, the most useful thing to do with it would be to spotlight things that are overlooked, marginalised, forgotten, or ignored”. Working in pencil, he believes that fundamentally pictures speak louder than words.
Perry’s illustrations are not as much about symmetry as they are about flow. From each of his creations there is a strong energy and a charming vibrancy that comes out of the medium to strike the beholders. Whether the color scheme is brilliant or tempered, Pat Perry always manages to give life to intriguing artworks in which one cannot but dive into, to discover all the emotions hidden among their layers thanks to undeniably amazing details.
 

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