Diego Perrone

Kings laughing, manga characters blushing, old men and women holding animal horns, geese and wild sheep posing for a camera, a well-known Italian comedian who strips completely naked, a dog at the brink of death, deep holes dug into the ground, mutilated ears, ears that are overlarge or too small, mutilated ears, a head decorated with tractors, fish, and yet more strange ears: a rich parade of bizarre creatures and characters have populated Diego Perrone's works over the course of the artist's twenty-five-year career. The (micro) narratives he spins, with their great variety of expressive means and formal methods (spanning photography, video, sculpture, drawing), are intended as a form of resistance to an expressive uniformity. Perrone wages a constant duel, working in an imaginative, other way than what convention would demand: regress to invent. This catalogue demonstrates the complexity of Perrone's practice with a thorough analysis of his work from the beginning to the present day. Essays by Luca Cerizza, Dieter Roelstraete, and Barbara Casavecchia are supported by concise texts in which the artist describes the motivations and genesis of his works; extracts from critical reviews; interviews between the artist and critics in Italy and abroad; and rigorous biographical and bibliographical appendices.