Tralli’s International Catalogue 1985 – October 1985
Critical review by Franco Tralli.

In Perghem Gelmi you can see a virtue which is very rare nowadays: a taste for irony. Cleverly and respectfully borrowing world famous works of art according to his taste and personality, he gives his own interpretation of contemporary situations and characters as in a fable or in a theatrical piece, conjuring up a multicoloured feast.
His is a great display of bravery and it is also a sign that Perghem Gelmi is very much aware of the means that he possesses – and not many painters can afford that.
A year later, I go back to his body of works and I find a connotation which seems very meaningful to me: the contemporary value of his art, which is created with means seemingly dating back to a distant past. This seems to create an historical chronicle or a futuristic image, a device to puzzle historians, critics or busybodies.
With him you will have to use the same standards with which we try and interpret Raphael, whose paintings seem so easy to decipher because people think they can be grasped only with their eyesight, on a superficial level.
On the contrary, Perghem Gelmi is a painter who is hard to understand, who plays with the viewers through his “historical gaps”, meddling with different episodes and characters in history.

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