Jim Pernotto was born in Youngstown, Ohio and grew up during
the fifties and sixties integrating the visual experience
of the dramatic Dante’s Inferno like industrial landscape
of the working steel mills in that city into his consciousness.
That landscape and components of his catholic upbringing
were stimulus to which he would respond to later in life
as an artist.
There have been several significant mentors throughout
Pernotto’s life. Joe Wilfer, a pioneer in the revolution
of hand papermaking was an initial influence. Wilfer’s
enthusiasm for printmaking and for paper was a strong impetus
for many artists. Pernotto apprenticed with him at his Upper
U.S. Papermill in Wisconsin. From him, Pernotto learned
about experimentation, paper and more importantly the nuances
necessary for cultivation of meaningful interpersonal relationships.
Their friendship continued until the artist’s death
in 1995.
The painter Sam Gilliam was also an early and pivotal influence.
Pernotto responded to and emulated the integrity and impeccability
that informed Gilliam’s approach to life and art.
From Gilliam, Pernotto gleaned a deeper understanding of
painting processes and of the social and conceptual issues
that affect art. Gilliam’s retrospective at the Corcoran
Gallery in Washington D.C. in 2005 was a recent inspiration
for Pernotto.
In 1980 Pernotto returned to Youngstown in order to set
up a studio to make large scale works. Princeton’s
celebrated art historian and critic, Sam Hunter, bestowed
the First Award in the 1981 Butler Institute of American
Art Midyear Painting Exhibition on the painting Passion
by Pernotto. Hunter purchased one of Pernotto’s paintings
for the Commodities Corporation Art Collection. That same
year, Pernotto’s work was included in an exhibition
at Barbara Fendrick gallery, which opened on Union Solidarity
Day, consisting of works created in response to the collapse
of the steel industry.
In 1990 the Madison Art Center featured Pernotto’s
spectacular twenty-foot high vacuum cast and painted doors,
Bab-Ili reminiscent of Rodin’s Gates of Hell. The
doors were cast utilizing artifacts rescued from abandoned
steel-mill sites. This industrial/archeological wreckage
as art implied political complicity. His large mural titled
Plantation Chapel addressed post-Columbian conquest in the
Americas and was critical of politico-religious hypocrisy.
Genetics; the Four Seasons explored issues related to genetic
engineering. As a result of the attention garnered by these
works, Pernotto was awarded two grants, a 1994 Ohio Arts
Council Fellowship and a 1994 Arts-Midwest National Endowment
for the Arts Fellowship.
The themes that Pernotto is currently investigating in
his work explore the science/myth nexus. It focuses on two
images working together to interweave time and space. Hinged
to DNA and the natural harmonics of Tzolkin, the Mayan sacred
calendar, Pernotto, in his recent work, probes new dimensions
of space and time by weaving together their respective genetic
and galactic codes. The Mayan calendar, which comes to an
end on December 21, 2012, and the solstice alignment at
Cuzco, Peru (toward the center of the galaxy), will coincide
with cosmic significance. Pernotto plans an artistic celebration
of that co-incidence.
This beautiful elegance of correlation between time and
space is too profound for the world to ignore. It is also
a correlation too profound for Pernotto not to pay due homage
to as an artist. Currently a new perspective on alchemy
is unraveling, not one that changes lead into gold but one
that touches on the prime mysteries of magic, mysticism
and religion, and poses a choice of either extinction or
enlightenment for humanity. This quest for enlightenment
informs Pernotto’s current work.
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