They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?

An exhibition of works by Lawrence Perry

10 January - 12 February, 2024

PV: 9 January, 6 - 8 pm

A Handful of Cherries, A Blade to the Neck

An essay by Matthew Holman

‘Nothing thicker than a knife’s blade separates happiness from melancholy.’

–– Virginia Woolf, Orlando (1928)

Lawrence Perry’s painting Character is Fate (all works 2024) is a close-up of a young woman’s handscupping lusciously ripe, blackened cherries, which are laden with symbolism: youth, mortality, growth, lust. One cherry is held, perilously, by the thinnest of stems. We imagine what hides beneath the glossy skin of those cherries and, against ourselves, envision the delicate fingers squeezing them until they burst open, flooding the pristine linen dress with titillating colour. The title, a riff on Heraclitis’ theory that it is one’s actions and decisions––ultimately, one’s character––which determines one’s future, not those of any external force, is pregnant with meaning. We are given only a cropped perspective, and the picture is disconcertingly ahistorical: while the unadorned linen might suggest medieval nunnery, the red star tattoo on the webbed space between thumb and forefinger is decidedly contemporary. In this subtle decision, Perry sets the tone for this new body of work that moves, restlessly and ceaselessly, back and forth through history, collecting myths along the way, but always observing the present moment in paint.

Perry is a voracious reader and often finds inspiration in the most unlikely of sources. Recently, he has been reading an obscure essay entitled ‘The World of Wrestling’ by the French philosopher and semiotician Roland Barthes. In it, Barthes describes how wrestlers ‘have a physique as peremptory as those of the characters of the Commedia dell’ Arte, who display in advance, in their costumes and actions, the future contents of their parts’. In such performances, we know what will happen before it happens; it is the opposite of life but, in that definite foresight, we are asked to think about all the alternative decisions not taken. The Commedia dell’ Arte (or ‘the comedy of the profession’) was an early form of carnivalesque theatre first staged in Neapolitan piazzas in which masked stock characters––trickster, know-it-all, greedy old man––perform to an agreed script but leave room for improvisation and audience participation. Perry was drawn to these conventions and, in Punch and Judith, splices together the English iteration of the Commedia dell’ Arte in puppetry (‘Punch and Judy’) with the Biblical story of Judith beheading Holofernes, the subject of a celebrated Baroque painting by Artemisia Gentileschi. A further scriptural allusion––the apple, perhaps the forbidden fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, which Adam and Eve eat and thus commit the first sin––is devoured by both figures. The scene, then, hovering on the very precipice of neck-slitting violence, speaks to Barthes’ idea that ‘catastrophe is brought to the point of maximum obviousness… all signs must be excessively clear, but must not let the intention of clarity be seen.’ In other words, we know the violence is imminent because all the characters’ gestures prepare us for it, but why the catastrophe is taking place remains opaque.

Read Full Essay Here