TRASUMANAR: PERRI NERI, MARY CRENSHAW, & CATERINA PERINETTI CASONI
EXHIBITION DATES: OCTOBER 1 – 26, 2024
RECEPTION: THURSDAY, OCTOBER 3, 5 – 8 PM
The Painting Center is pleased to present Trasumanar, a collaboration between painter Perri Neri from New York City, multi-media artist Mary Crenshaw from Milan, Italy, and visual and performance artist Caterina Perinetti Casoni from Brescia, Italy.
Trasumanar is a powerful word to bring into a visual existence. Coined by Dante Alighieri to describe the experience of human nature evolving to a higher level, Trasumanar embodies a journey through the simulacra of fears and desires. The sensual pull of being human and the spiritual mission to transcend human limitations set the conceptual and structural framework for visual artists Perri Neri, Mary Crenshaw, and Caterina Perinetti Casoni aka Peri Neri. This exhibition reflects their parallel journeys through diverse experiences, places, and states of mind, each capturing an intimate search for greater understanding. Together, yet separately, they embarked on an obsessive quest for something to believe in; something that reflects humanity itself, even when it is frightening.
Mary Crenshaw is a mixed-media artist who embraces chance and experimentation, combines tufting with collage and poured enamel paint. Commonly used in relocating, packing paper symbolizes transition, movement, the fragility of human lives, and temporary, precarious situations. Her collage techniques relate to the patchwork nature of asylum seekers’ identities and experiences and the fragments of their pasts that blend with new experiences. The folded paper suggests compression and the necessity to fit into new and often constrained spaces and situations. Folded paper also evokes the idea of hidden, untold stories revealed over time. Crenshaw is interested in themes of impermanence, pressure, resilience, history, memory, experience, dislocation, and reorientation.
Caterina Perinetti Casoni aka Peri Neri is an artist whose path was born in theatrical scenography and continues in millinery, combining sculptural language with visual and performing art. The body is an instrument of meditation, adorned with clothes, headdresses, masks, and protrusions, serving as a border between inner and outer life. With constant and passionate attention to detail, Peri Neri looks to ancient ceremonies and symbolic practices to embody rituals, cultural codes, and unwritten rules into a profound body of work. The funerary mask is an important part of the artist’s Trasumanar oeuvre – the ever-fascinating enigma that unites communities and transcends reason. Also on view is Extended Reality, an audiovisual ceremony featuring a live performance by Peri Neri exploring the universe of masks, evoking rituals, and guiding our imagination. Which deep identities are masks able to manifest, and which do they hide?
Perri Neri (New York, NY) is an artist rooted in figuration. Her paintings and drawings navigate psychological territories of identity using the power of line and the drama of color. The set design for a painting is a gestalt, the body, evolutions of gestures, tones, impulses, and sensations. Neri maps out the miscellany of predicaments that coexist in the same moment and trusts the path in front of her. Some paths lead to fragmentation, to pain, to confusion, and others lead to wholeness, to harmony, to silence, to reconciliation between self and other. Neri embraces the risks and the transformation that comes from the act of making.
