| An Essay by Frank Polite,
1993
Pernotto
Pernotto is a “Compleat Artist,” able in all
mediums and styles. Well maybe not all. I don’t know
that he chisels marble, blows glass or torches iron into
“phantastic” shapes. I have never seen it although
it wouldn’t surprise me. Surprise itself being commonplace
in his work.
Just when I settle into a Pernotto mode and go to his next
show expecting to see my expectations (our oh so human desire
not to inhabit but habituate our lives), he has shifted
the furniture around or kicked it apart altogether. Pernotto
delights, infuriates, creates. He moves on.
As art inhabits him he inhabits his art – literally.
He lives in his own studio-warehouse in downtown Youngstown,
its vast spaces resplendent with a bewildering array of
works, from exquisitely detailed handpainted books (the
size of the palm of one’s hand) to 20 ft. high cast
paper columns that, upright, would go through the ceiling.
My fantasy of Pernotto is as Melville described Perth the
blacksmith at his forge in MOBY DICK:
While
yet a little distance from the forge, moody Ahab
Paused; till at last, Perth, withdrawing his hammer from
the fire, began hammering it upon the anvil – the
red mass sending off sparks in thick hovering flights,
some of which flew close to Ahab.
“Are these thy
chickens, Perth? They are always flying in thy wake; birds
of good omen, too, but not to all; - look here, they burn;
but thou – thou liv’st among them without
a scorch.”
“Because
I am scorched all over, Captain Ahab,” answered
Perth, “… not easily can’st thou scorch
a scar.”
Thin, gracious, handsome man that he is, Pernotto hardly
fits the burly blacksmith image. But there’s no doubt
about the work, the commitment, and the scorching.
Chapel
PASSION (1982) and ONLY THOSE WHO HAVE DRUNK FROM THE SAME
CUP KNOW US (1992) are what I term fin de millennium paintings,
depictions of a done-deal, wrap-ups in a classical mode.
Powerful works they are, justly celebrated, and appropriate
as great stained-glass windows in a chapel, or more appropriately
perhaps a cathedral. In PASSION a world that has been a
long time dying, died. Locally for us, the steel mills folded,
the people stunned into grief, indifference, absurdity,
and a way of life crucified. Nationally, in Pernotto’s
words, “Upon returning to Youngstown in 1980, it had
become clear that I was privy to the collapse of the American
Industrial Revolution and was about to document its effect.”
Universally, Suffering itself is seen in profunditas of
human experience.
Only the scorched, a living scar, can penetrate to this
vision, and only a great artist express all its levels at
once.
In ONLY THOSE…, completed 10 years after PASSION,
Pernotto revisits Jesus, so to speak, in his post-mortem
meal with disciples in the village of Emmaus. The background
is Manhattan; Jesus a red jacketed biker-artist-warrior
type. A variety of symbolic images fill the painting-bread,
fish, an espresso can with ROMA on it, a picture of the
Coliseum where a whole lot of the faithful were martyred.
But, one must ask this sharply, so what? Can the age-old
Judeo-Christian show be revived, updated, and sent out on
the road again. Jesus Christ as Mel Gibson in Road Warrior?
Do we recognize him? Do his disciples? If so, does it matter?
The disciples are looking to us for the answer, not Jesus.
Each of us answers for him/her self. For me the stained-glass
is shattered beyond repair, beyond in fact any desire to
repair it. As Yeats wrote in his great fin de millennium
poem.
“The Second Coming,”
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world ….
Perilous
To me, the peril in Chapel Perilous is in Pernotto”s
recent paintings (or sequence of panels) GENETICS-The Four
Seasons, PLANTATION CHAPEL, and the series of smaller paintings
that continue onward, presumably into the future (but with
Pernotto, you never know). These paintings, starting with
GENETICS, are the first in this style, a collage format
derived from his sketchbooks.
What in the world is going on? As far as I can tell, the
center did not hod, and anarchy, mere or otherwise, is surely
loosed. In PLANTATION CHAPEL, for instance, entities loom
up before us that have no hierarchy of importance. A pan
of fried eggs equals Toscanini = Olive Oyl = launched missiles
= a hand on a lovely ass (L-O-V-E spelled out on the fingers)
= Christopher Columbus pointing West = a gaggle of martyrs
hung from a log = the logos Del Monte = Popeye telling his
magic dog Jeep, “We burn some we boil some but we
don’t crucify no more.” Words and fragments
of sentences appear and dissolve. El sueno de la razon –
from Goya’s famous warning, when reason sleeps, monsters
are born. The monster born out of this sueno is Cecil the
sea monster from the Cecil & Beany cartoon TV show.
Pernotto means you to see these panels as an imaging process,
not as thoughts. The images are paramount – colors,
textures, juxtapositions, subconscious connections that
that do not necessarily suggest any content beyond their
visual impact. In effect, pure painting. The viewer, in
fact, in invited to project her/his own free-floating images
into these panels, including yourself as viewer looming
up, yourself being viewed perhaps by a pan of fried eggs.
We are all in this vortex of images together; there is no
hierarchy of importance, and all this stuff is going on
at the same time.
Pernotto has not lost his moorings, he has left them. He
has set sail through these panels with a great Hero-Mariner
on a perilous voyage through the flotsam of shattered empires,
shattered belief systems, and the horrors of antiquated
cultures devouring each other. No, the Hero-Mariner is not
Gilgamesh, Odysseus, Christ (waterwalker), Dante, Sinbad,
the Vikings, Columbus, Magellan, Abraham Lincoln (“O
Captain, my Captain”), Captain Kirk, nor the first
great Her-Mariner, the male sperm. Note in the first panel
of GENETICS (Spring), which begins Pernotto’s new
work, how out of the white bunny (birth) pops Earth as its
left eye, and out of its right eye pops Popeye. A magical
journey starts here that will carry Popeye in word or image
through GENETICS, PLANTATION CHAPEL, and the continuing
sequence of panels. Popeye as Hero-Mariner, as Witness,
as the only figure able to sil through these fabled quadrants
and not take himself so seriously.
I don’t know what Popeye is to Pernotto or Pernotto
to Popeye. My best hazarded guess is that Popeye is the
popped Eye, the visual impact; Art itself that will negotiate
the perils and dire straits of the new millennial Kingdoms
to come.
-
Frank Polite, 1993
|
