The initial interest and the painting practice take place through meetings with Oreste Bogliardi, who is one of the founder of abstract art in Italy. At the time, in the area of the region called Tigullio, the artistic and literary group composed by Bogliardi, the sculptor Cherchi, the writer Nino Palumbo, the painter and sculptor Franco Bagnasco, and others, was vital. Lately, he learns how to use enamel paint from Edoardo Krumm. Krumm is in fact extremely skilful and passionate about enamel paint that allows particular effects in mixture, which is impossible to obtain with other materials.Moreover, some art works made with the use of acrylics confer serenity to urban representations of the artistic period between 1997-2003.
Roberto Perotti is very creative not only in the scientific and literary area; he has always been a painter close to the style of abstract expressionism even if he has always added to it his personal trait which changed according to the diverse pictorial phases. He carefully chose and measured out his own expositions. The intensity of his pictorial message can also be seen in the art works available on this web site. According to Perotti, art works must have the primary aim of making people dream, emotion and think.He makes a clear distinction between technique and creativity. He sees the first one as the hand made part of the art work; while the second one is seen as the essence of any type of work that wants to be part of art history, if it has the quality. The technique is the same ability that allows to falsify famous or less famous art works: in fact, it allows to copy them and not to create them. Therefore, the first aspect is handmade while the second is art; of course this clear distinction could be made if the creation has the dignity of art, which is something that rarely occurs.
PHASES
He goes through different phases, from pure abstraction, abstract expressionism, action painting, to a partial use of the figurative in some of his art works in different periods. Particular is the figurative approach expressed through a partially formal and singular application of the action painting.He was selected from the art critic Germano Beringheli, and inserted inside the dictionary of artists of Liguria in 2006.
The definition “action painting” , also called abstract expressionism, represents an artistic flow of the second half of the twentieth century, whose main exponent is Jackson Pollock.In this type of painting style, instinct prevails on rationality, even if this does not mean that we are facing a chaotic and silly painting.There are two reasons for this. The first one is that the instinct has a particular structure that is in contact with the rational part; and that compensates and equilibrates it.The second is that the progression of painting still remains inserted within a conscious direction, which results in an harmonious whole: it is a project more apparent than real.The sense of colour and the sense of form are the necessary prerogatives to whom wants to dedicate his job, all of it or part of it, to painting or to figurative arts. These two skills certainly belong to Perotti and they allow him to express the sense of beauty and the balance of harmony. Reminding that also in the use of diversity there should be a global completeness.Perotti believes that “beauty cures” and he makes the evocation of beauty the sense and the aim of his art works.
In the period of abstract expressionism, the paintings express strong emotions, an intense passion, sometimes anger and turmoil. However, there is always chromatic balance.
Lately, there is the phase of sequences of colours, with a predominant reference to the villages of Liguria.Here as well prevail intense and pure colours, however alternated to “almost absence” of colour, which express the spiritual need of fullness and emptiness, of passion and of contemplation. Almost at the end of the second millennium, in the sequences of stylized city, domes appear, the presence of temples of diverse origins: a reflex of the mixture of cultures and people, but also the formal necessity to unite the pure linearity with the pure and full form like the one of the semi circle and the dome. Symbolic recalls and formal needs contribute to create one more suggestion in the painting of Perotti.
The expressive research increases with the insertion of an activity which is between sculpture and painting. Here starts the phase of metallic nets, folded and shaped as abstract forms but also involving, covered with fluorescent paint and lightened with light of wood, in a way to create a very peculiar effect of forms and lights.
At last, the use of pictures’ enlargement. They are first changed on the computer and then transformed by direct painting intervention, using diverse materials and diverse painting techniques.
Short reflection of Perotti on the meaning of the word “art”I participated at a conference about neuroscience and aesthetics, in occasion of the 2009 science festival in Genoa, where two teachers of aesthetics of the University of Milan were not able to give a definition of “art”. Surely, the matter is complex and it can pose several interpretative questions. Anyway, I would like to propose a plausible and shared definition of art. I would also like to do it very shortly because usually the more words are used the less clear results the concept that needed to be defined. I believe that it can be defined as art or artistic everything that, in the area of aesthetic perception, inserts something new, either in the expressive form or in the subject represented, and at the same time causes emotion, and possibly makes people dream. The combination of the “new” with the emotional involvement witnesses the conviction that something new and completely rational does not constitute, per se, an art piece.
DANIELE CRIPPA