ALTO ADIGE, 6 April 1986.
“Perghem Gelmi’s China” opened at the Chamber of Commerce yesterday.
Critical review by Franco de Battaglia.

You will see forty-six paintings, which will show you an old-fashioned yet very modern way of approaching art. You shall recognize a search for synthesis and mediation, which prevent impressions and images from becoming banal (read: Iperrealist pedantry and critical Surrealism). On the contrary, the intention of the artist is to communicate with his viewers.
From his spacious studio embracing the city skylight, not only does the painter Perghem Gelmi take the plunge into history but he also jumps into air and light. If Chagall were still alive, he would most likely turn Perghem into a character of his paintings, one of those creatures who seems to hang suspended in the sky, flying dreamily over cities and fields, despite being quite set in the reality of things. In short: a solid character floating in an unreal dimension. That’s how Perghem Gelmi appears to you when you meet him in person, with his feet on the ground but with eyes forever exploring skies lost and found. He has a strong, athletic build and looks fifteen years younger than his seventy-five years; he has a passion for sports that has stayed wiht him since childhood. He was in the Athletics National Team in 1934 (400 mt) then in the National School Ski Team in 1937. He is still a dedicated tennis player and cross-country skier. His “sturdiness” can be detected also in his experiences and professional choices. In fact, he is very straight with politicians and very sound with friends, ready to put his personal independence before any ingratiating exercise.
Nevertheless, despite his apparent “firmness”, Perghem Gelmi conveys a feeling of profound restlessness, always searching for something, both on a human and on an artistic level. He is always experimenting with different styles, which can be traced back to an “ancient”, traditional Surrealism, but reflect very contemporary urges, passions and impulses.
He has always been a painter, born with a pencil in his hand, so to speak. He was an engineer but just so that he could be free to paint without being enslaved to fashionable art movements, critics’ flattery or art gallery fees. Especially in his late career, he managed to imbue his work with such an artistic depth that he came to be recognized as one of the most significant painters of his time, transcending all local bounds.
His Iperrealistic style, veering towards Surrealism, renders his images not just “charming” but able to dignify the roles of painting and the painter (albeit in the middle of the 20th century!) as the true interpreter and protagonist of his reality. Through his work with paints and paintbrushes, the artist gains back his role as an interpreter of distant times and spaces, which are present within everybody’s heart.
In this context, his works, with their refined tones and hues which may often appear as “academic”, are entirely modern and able to convey new meanings – and this is, indeed, the final aim of art.
If you happened to see Perghem Gelmi’s late large paintings, representing the bourgeois way of life - about how it feels like to be a politician in Trento for instance, you will know exactly what I mean. His “Bernardo Clesio”, which he painted for the quadricentennial anniversary, is self-explanatory in this sense: the bishop Bernardo Clesio introduces the very grey members of the political class to a cardinal who is set against a multicoloured Renaissance facade. This device seems quite eloquent, or so it appeared to many of the subjects who were portrayed.
At the same time, his “Last Supper” with the wives of his Lyons Club friends sitting leisurely around a brilliant and efficient Marco Oreste Detassis, goes well beyond a refined ironical joke with his club mates and explores a certain social context, concentrating on the female role and her presence in a certain social milieu. The same can be said about his doctor friends, depicted “à la Rembrandt” while they are musing over a corpse during an “anatomy lesson”. Are these paintings just the divertissements of a bizzare and original mind? It doesn’t look like it. On the contrary, they seem to represent an attempt to interrogate his own citizens, which he sees as too complacent about themselves and their limits, incapable of ruptures or emotions, unable of running risks or thinking big. He wants to re-establish a new sense of art, closer to everyday life and far from its solitary dimension, grand but also mortal, where art ends up when its vital bonds with life are severed.
This is the direction that we need to take when we examine Perghem Gelmi’s latest efforts, his new exhibition made up of forty-six works about China, which opened at the Chamber of Commerce yesterday. Last August he was in China for a month, “on a package holiday”, as he himself defined it, far from the adventurous voyages that watercolour painters and sketchers used to embark upon in old times. However, even from such a conventional trip, Perghem Gelmi wanted to “draw out” a series of paintings. His aim was that of interpreting and putting forward faces, landscapes, human beings and streets, in ordert to show some authentic aspects of that great country, so that they would not get lost, or worse, get banalized through memories or holiday snapshots. He believed strongly in his task: achieving a painter’s panoramic view over China, such as his “Bernardo Clesio” represented a panoramic view over four hundred years of our local history.
His declared intention was to show enchanting moments of pure intensity, beauty and contradictions, which China mixes together in its millenary history. And it is a mixture of sweetness and balance that are forever fascinating and offering up new, original perspectives, as can be seen in the Chinese search for progress without a will to destroy mankind, a common wealth not degenerating into violent consumerism.
With all this in mind, Perghem Gelmi painted his views of China and he tried to represent the softness of the mountain landscape of Guilin, the maternal light in the looks of young mothers with children, the workers simply getting through their day and the magic, evocative views of the Thousand Buddha Mountain, the meeting of a country doctor with three generations during a visit to a child, or some baskets lying about by a harbour.
This exbition turns Perghem Gelmi’s trip to China into an illuminating insight into contemporary life and culture. The China exhibition is Perghem Gelmi’s second “travel sketchbook”, coming two years after his Mexican one. However, the difference is striking and so is his growing confidence and clearness of mind. As an old sportsman, Perghem Gelmi knows very well that success can be reached only through pain and persistence and that a long run takes great, constant training.

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