Synthesis, Year 1, Issue n. 2/3 July-August 1973
Critical review by Gian Pacher.

Nine years ago, around this time of the year, I met the painter Michelangelo Perghem Gelmi. I knew him as the famed engineer, the established professional. Being a fond sportsman myself, I was aware that he had worn the blue-coloured top of the national Olympic team and I knew about his other sports exploits as a distance runner. Thinking of him as a painter, an artist of colours, completed for me the picture of a very versatile man, both in a cultural and human way. In the years after our first encounter, I followed closely the development of Michelangelo’s works, being aware that I was looking at a painter free from all stereotypes. And what made me reflect on this fact was the prevalence of curving lines. This showed Michelangelo’s search for a dynamic approach to art, his inclination for formal research, his will to disrupt the existing relations between mass and volume. I noticed that Michelangelo felt almost a physical pleasure imbuing his paintings with a strong emotional charge, thus reaching a completely free form of expression.
This sense of freedom is also at the core of his search for imagination. Far from being escapist works, his imaginative paintings are the result of his careful mental process, which longs to create a story through the fragmentation and subsequent reconstruction of his emotions.
It wasn’t an easy interior process which led Perghem Gelmi to operate outside the given figurative and architectural parameters, at the peak of his maturity as an artist. However, once he reached this stage, his initial struggle became a new, positive development in his art, where he could put together his technical background, his taste, his technical virtuosity and finally his imagination.
There are some aspects of his “imaginative surrealism” that I would like to analyse here.
Firstly, I must point out the elements of the dream, with many references to literature, to Crepuscolarism and periods in his own life. If one looks closer at his figures, one can often detect human and phallic symbols. In this type of paintings, there is an element of “jeunesse retrouvée”, allusive and romantically detached, to which the passing of time and the wiseness of the old age add an alluring, nostalgic tint.
Secondly, Perghem Gelmi seems to offer up the image of a different, more vivid, aggressive reality full of contrasts and dazzling in his strong colours. These are the mementos of his travels to South America, to Argentina and Brazil. On his canvases, the colours explode like those of a Rio Carnival, with the same exuberant force, sensuality and intensity. His themes are the masks and totems, the party scenes, his views of infinite open spaces, created with the contrasts of his palette. They are the true leitmotivs of his imaginative style. In fact, it is not by chance that such vibrant and ardent paintings can be recognised as the painter’s tribute to Lucio Fontana, a South American himself. And when Perghem Gelmi cuts his canvases, he does so to point at the free space which lies behind – and beyond - the painting, a free space where one can experience fully the wonderful contrasts of form and colour, of art and movement, originated by the miraculous bloom of nature.
And here lies, in my opinion, Perghem Gelmi’s most interesting and most personal phase. In his invention of original plants and trees, wonderful and luxuriant, sensitive and sensual, he becomes an imaginary botanist. He invents new species, as if he were operating amidst gems and pollens, as if he were actually observing these extra-terrestrial plants with enquiring eyes instead of flower bulbs, as if they were “moonflowers” – instead of sunflowers, which in fact belong to the real Earth. These trees and plants don’t exist in nature but seem to retain something familiar: they are unknown, exotic plants with an extra-terrestrial character.
The most interesting aspect is that Perghem Gelmi does not give his plants a metaphorical significance, as a surrealist painter would do. Nor does he create allusive, dream-like, horrid forms. On the contrary, he behaves like a rigorous scientist who has just landed on a new, original planet, away from the beaten path. He is a witness of new forms and he sets himself to classify and study them as they are, far from any metaphysical intention. Therefore, it is very important to view Perghem Gelmi’s work in this new light, creating a new “botany”, playing with the sense of real and unreal, thus achieving a new creative freedom.
In Perghem Gelmi’s paintings there is no room for technical uncertainties, nor is he unsure of his flamboyant imagination, which continually presents the viewers with landscapes of complete human compassion.

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