Il NUOVO GIORNALE, weekly, October 1986.
Critical text by Ennio Concarotti.

The quality of irony in Perghem Gelmi’s works
Perghem Gelmi’s works will be showing at “La Meridiana” art gallery at via Calzolai, 65 until 23 October. He is an original painter from Trentino with a strong Surrealist slant and a traditional, well rounded style of painting. Besides a very solid technique, he is also a great master of composition, which is in a way understandable, if we consider that his professional background is architecture.
Perghem Gelmi’s Surrealism is to be traced back more in content than in form. His art resembles a well-accomplished, sturdy boat, flying the flag of a country named “Irony”. The whole body of work on show here in Piacenza can be enjoyed as a display of irony, a show of Perghem Gelmi’s great ability to mock and disrupt certain tired, worn-out statements, solemn official events, the worship of art “bigwigs”.
As a matter of fact, in all of his paintings, the captions give away the tricks and the mockery, and plays a most important role in the explanation of the work. These captions are like red ants in the minds of those who still consider painting as a pure aesthetical expression or as a mere didactic and moral stance.
Perghem Gelmi’s works come like bolts out of the blue, generating a disrupting and critical power through their accomplished traits, which however hint at different purposes and final aims.
Perghem Gelmi’s Surrealist trait seldom draws its inspiration from cultural and literary sources, although the Trentino artist tries his hand at saucy versions of famous Goya and Modigliani’s masterpieces. More often, Perghem Gelmi relies on popular culture, freely interpreting ancient proverbs and given popular assumptions full of apparent common sense, but which he adores to turn inside out. Unlike other Surrealist painters, he does not subvert or disrupt the visual form but leaves it intact and extremely enjoyable, thus undermining its own aesthetic significance.
This exhibition is both very pleasant and very surprising. We are contemplating a painter who masters his art very well but subverts all the usual codes through an all-pervading irony. His palette is charmingly soft and elegant, organized in an armonic compositon that at times reaches highly poetic peaks. Nevertheless, the intriguing elegance of his trait serves as a starting point for an intelligent review, enjoyable firstly for him as a painter and secondly for his viewers. This seems to hint at an overtly ironical psychological reading, at times imbued with a touch of venom.

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