TRENTINO, daily newspaper, 28 May 2003
Critical text by Franco de Battaglia.

An anthological exhibition of the engineer and mocking but coherent painter.

A metaphysical artist of the 20th Century.
Tribute to Perghem Gelmi’s Faustian talent, often misunderstood.

Michelangelo Perghem Gelmi had a lean, bold face and his gaze was often lost in distant visions or enquiring and ironical. He was an engineer and a painter (1911-1992) and the Trentino public can admire his genius, and finally his insolence - without censorship or hypocritical respectability - in the solo exhibition organized at Palazzo Trentini in Trento.
As a town planner, Perghem Gelmi left a numer of important works and projects: the spa buildings in Levico and Merano; “Alpine”-style housing estates of great taste, far from kitsch, equivalent to the successful Sottsass, a project for the village of Vaneze. In this case, the idea was turning the actual parking place into a square, positioning the latter on a higher level, with the intent of reinforcing the sense of a real village while at the same time creating a big underground parking. This project was too simple and too naïve to go down with the local building industry. He devised a project for the south suburbs of Trento as well. This comprised a boulevard and the town planner Busquets is intending to use this idea again. But at that time the suburb developed chaotically, stretching as far as the top of the hill.
Nevertheless, painting remained his true passion and his complete oeuvre can be admired in this exhibition at Palazzo Trentini. His style is an heterogeneous mixture of styles, reaching great heights at times and turning into incomprehensible coldness at others. Perghem Gelmi painted all the time – it was his way of expressing himself – he kept exercising with the drawing, but from the beginning of the 1970s he devoted himself entirely to painting and he gradually acquired an original style which was also very much imbued with 20th century themes. It is not by chance that the MART, Museum of Modern Art, acquired for its archives his whole body of works, donated by the children Maria Rosa, Guglielmina and Mario: from the notes and the drawings dating back to his years in the German prison camps to his Provence trips and the works he produced during his long South American period, which were created in styles reminiscent of different movements: Surrealism, metaphysical art and finally Iperrealism, all 20th century ideas.

At a time when painters tend to stick to a signature style or an icon, to which they recur again and again in order to be recognized by the art market, it is quite surprising to see the variety of painting styles of Perghem Gelmi: landscapes and portraits, still lives and travel art (from the Mayas to China), nudes and Trento landscapes, mocking versions of famous paintings, apple-headed men à la Magritte. As a matter of fact, in all his paintings there is a profound coherence. He understood, more than some of his fellow contemporary artists, that the real outcome of the 20th century after the “mechanical” Futurism could be nothing but the “metaphysical”, and that the whole body of 20th century art, from “Chiarismo” to Surrealism, passing via Iperrealism, is a variation on the theme of the (impossible?) hunt for the metaphysical. Iperrealism, ardently followed by Perghem Gelmi in his late years, is the peak of the Surrealist metaphysics: man transcends reality through an attention to detail.

Here lies Perghem Gelmi’s coherence. He was almost a Faustian character: strong, authoritative, much loved, passionate about sports, successful in everything he set his mind to do, and his (coherent) source of inspiration was also Faustian in some respect: an attempt to show that painting could penetrate every aspect of life, the sacred and the profane, the sweetest erotism as well as the most disturbing mental abstraction. Here lies the key to understanding his works: a great urge to show, through painting, the limitations and the greatness of the 19th century, “of what tears and what blood” * life and art are soaked into. His Surrealist vein served him also as a means to unmask evil and the mal de vivre.

The last aspect I would like to discuss here about this great artist of the 20th century – and the excellent catalogue written by Elisabetta Staudacher and Maurizio Scudiero will need to be extended – concerns the term “parody”. Indeed, many of his paintings, anticipating the postmodern movement of Transavanguardia, refer to other famous works. I find this quite a disquieting but interesting aspect of his art, presumably derived by his Argentinian period. We mustn’t forget the lesson that Borges theorized in his Buenos Aires library about the necessity for art to be based on literature and not on real life. Perghem Gelmi absorbed his teachings and never forgot about them, taking them with him to Trento together with his paintings - “quotations” like guiding lights to show his friends the way through an unrepeatable century, both in its greatness and its meanness, which Perghem Gelmi knew very well.

• Translation of “di che lacrime grondi e di che sangue” , quotation taken from the poem “I Sepolcri” by Ugo Foscolo.

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