Celebrated for his murals and edgy narrative figure paintings with saturated palettes and multifaceted architectural compositions, the new work of nationally-acclaimed artist Lincoln Perry will be on spotlight at SALT Gallery throughout the month of February.
“The caliber of this creative community continues to amazes me,” says SALT Gallery owner Jeffrey Cardenas. “Lincoln is yet another neighbor who one might see snapper fishing one day and then the next day his work may be at auction in Christies. To have his work in a solo show at SALT is an extraordinary opportunity for Key West.”
Perry’s SALT Gallery exhibit will feature more than a dozen oil pastels on paper—work that highlights Perry’s interest in abstraction while maintaining figurative elements. It is at once sensual, edgy, and intelligent, with intertwining figures that both “manage or fail to connect,” he says, and suggest “murky power imbalances or mutual pleasure.”
“Subject matter is powerful when embodied in form, when structural decisions convey content,” he says.
Though he works with figures he defies or reconstitutes the specifics of visual perception, pushing images in the direction of an abstraction that plays with form making color shapes. Some have called him a thinker, though he might say a visual thinker, one who asks the viewer to think as well. His figures make the eye move; they demand a deeper investigation. He masterfully presents a complex journey that controls the viewer’s speed and direction with his carefully-thought-out constructions that reveal the “story” in his work.
“If there’s a spectrum from dutiful or literal naturalism to totally non-representational imagery, I find myself prowling some middle ground, letting the viewer identify with the human content while being aware of the image as a formal construct, as an object,” he says.
A graduate of Columbia with an MFA from Queens College, Perry has exhibited widely since 1979 in galleries and museums throughout the country. He first came to Key West in 1968 as a “shoeless hippie” when he hitchhiked to the island to help sail a boat to New York. He returned in 1991 with celebrated author and wife Anne Beattie, purchasing a home a few years later and now splitting their time between Key West and York, Maine.
“From my workaholic family, I had the idea that in the tropics, one would slowly melt into the sand while lazily drinking oneself to death,” he says. “So I was surprised by how much I got done here, by how inspiring I found it all.”
Perry is not moved by current fashion. “Someone said there may be no such thing as art, only artists,” he says. “Try to look at what this person is spending their life doing, and see if it speaks to you. I think we want a sensibility, an intelligence of some kind when we look; we want to see that someone is at home, perhaps fighting the good fight, or perhaps just enjoying themselves.”
SALT Gallery features a new artist each month; Perry’s work will remain on display throughout February. For more information, call 305.896.2980 or visit SALTGalleryKeyWest.com.