The culturalist: the identity pride in the portraits of Jem Perucchini

This entry is posted on the number 15 of Vanity Fair on newsstands until April 8, 2025

When in 1995 in Venice I cured the Campo exhibition, which celebrated the birth of the Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Foundation, In Tekeze, Ethiopia, Jem Perucchini was born (Turin, Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Foundation, until 12/10).

A lot of water passed under the bridges of contemporary art, e Today Perucchini is one of the most interesting artists of his generation and one of the most interesting Italian artists. His painting is rich in every sense. Visually and culturally. Behind a thin aesthetic facade there is the pride of one’s identity and the strength of one’s origins. But also the no longer too latent transformation of our society, different and multi -ethnic, a symbol of an essential generational renewal to look to the future with optimism.

Perucchini’s works grow both as high as the branches of a tree and below, sinking the roots in the history of Italian arttouching figures like Vittore Carpaccio but also Galileo Chini, Vittorio Zecchin or Umberto Brunelleschi. The intertwining of contemporary and classic symbolism is the magical recipe with which Perucchini inventing a mysterious and unmistakable language, the result of geographical overlaps generated by the inevitable, constant and unstoppable exchange of a world with a thousand dimensions and directions.

Faithful to the uniqueness of one’s gaze, it seems to have found its space out of chronological time and within the time of fantasy. His characters are portraits or self -portraits of ghosts With sweater decorated with the reasons for a sort of postcolonial Renaissance. If we were talking about music, one could say that the art of Jem Perucchini is a Fela Kuti played by Chopin, or maybe the opposite.

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