“La Faretra” Art Gallery, Ferrara, November 1973, solo exhibition.
Critical review by Luigi Serravalli.

Perghem’s Surrealism
Although the new artistic movements are imbued with more and more abstract, intellectual and disengaged theories, I must admit that I have positive feelings regarding this new artistic experience, whose final outcome will be both unique and polysemous. The artist transforms into sign, form and color what he sees in the psychological and anthropological movements. This is filtered through the richness of his life experience, the impact of life’s incidents, his cultural background and his examination of different situations. All these elements build up the equipment he needs to search for the source of his interests and his passions.
A lot of contemporary artworks originate from artists’ need for escape brought about by his alienation. On the contrary, Michelangelo stands before his work with a strong hold and command, through which he is able to enrich it and make it more complex.
Before I took a look at the artist, I wanted to know the man. That is why I decided to visit Perghem Gelmi at his atelier in via Venezia in Trento. This was a very big attic, equipped to suit the artist’s needs. Some little, simple changes have made the attic comfortable and fit to live in, although a primitive touch still remains. It’s a roughly built studio of ancient make (Moggioli worked there): there are many visible beams, grey stones, sloping rooves and heaps of canvasses, easels and worktops scattered all around. In a place like this, a person feels good, free and active, provided he has a strong personality, able to search within himself without having to resort to fancy interior design gimmicks, often a sign of creative bareness and insecurity. So this is where Perghem Gelmi ended up, after so many years.
He was a student with Enrico Paulucci at the Accademia Albertina in Turin, then he made his first encounter with French painting in Provence during the war. He was transferred from Cannes to Tarnopol as a war prisoner of the Germans. He painted also when he was in Poland and organized his first solo exhibition in the lager of Deblin-Irena. His prison years offered him the chance to concentrate entirely on his painting, on his soul-searching and meditatation on existential themes. Once he was back in Italy, he turned to engineering until he emigrated to Argentina where he became a teacher at San Juan University (“Universidad Nacional de Cuyo”) from 1949 to 1955. In Argentina he was an engineer, a teacher and a painter and organized a few solo exhibitions. On his return to Italy, he continued to follow his two passions, building and painting. He held yet more solo exhibitions in Trento, Rovereto, Cortina d’Ampezzo, Flayosc in France, and finally in Ferrara, at the “La Faretra” Art Gallery. All the various incidents of his life need to be taken into consideration, in order to have a complete picture of the artist’s works, whose education, deeply set in the 20th century, was influenced by his periods in Trento, Turin, France and South America, where he soon discovered his surrealist vein.
The paintings dating before the war are all landscapes, portraits, figures in a toned-down style, well-balanced both in the forms and in time. But one landscape, of considerable scale, already shows synthesis and analysis: here is a man who sets nature to a new order, thus expressing a rationalized emotion, moving towards the object with the interest of a painter and that of a technician, who takes everything into consideration and has acquired a new, more personal way of treating the canvas. His deep knowledge of perspective, acquired through his profession, adds a new dimension to the study of the relationships among different planes. This is how the landscape acquires depth and becomes imposing.
However, later on, having analysed the multifarious international movements of his time, Perghem Gelmi chose for himself a freer, more creative style and saw in Surrealism a key to satisfy his need for freedom inside a given order. Surrealism is in itself a sum of different movements, the result of a complex iconic culture. Perghem Gelmi is a master of colour – you can see it in the series of litographs dedicated, a little Dufy-style, to the Isle of Ischia. He is an engineer, so he tends towards architecture and the Decòr, the ornamental. He carries inside the influences of a certain trend of Trentino painting (the intense colours of Depero) and feels the influences of the Neo-Liberty style, through a process which is not due to “fashion” but “meditation”. His experience in Ferrara, the city of Ariosto-style fantasies, turns this exhibition into one of the most interesting and stimulating events of the season. The plants devised by Perghem Gelmi would happily find their just collocations in the garden of Marfisa or in the symbolic meanings of Schifanoia.
Surrealism has never been only a game for Perghem Gelmi. On the contrary, it represents a means to reach a higher level of knowledge, dramatically different from the common scientific methods he was accustomed to, but none the poorer or less valid.
The actual Surrealist movement is well known, but elements of the surrealist category can be traced in artistic expressions of all ages, as there has always been a “surreal” approach to life.
Perghem Gelmi sees Surrealism as a means to free his art, while his scientific background enables him to organize the painting in a perfect, almost meticulous way. His life experience turns into nature metaphores which reflect the richness of his past. His likings and experiences are mirrored in the unexpected, dynamic, rich population of plants, herbs, flowers and leaves. Perghem Gelmi chooses to address a different dream, fantasy or neurosis (we all have some) in each different painting, using a variety of forms, always fighting against boredom or repetition.
The magical content, the symbols, the nature and animal allegories take form in a way which is hard to classify. The plants or their elements are indifferently made up or real, mainly belonging to a European or a South American environment. They remind the viewers both of the sensual exuberance of the Côte d'Azur Mediterranean flora and of a distant South American country. You could imagine some of his paintings as illustrations of the fables of Macunaima by De Andreade, you could see others gracing the walls of white villas in Grasse or Ménton or against the blue sea landscape of Ischia. His interpretation of Surrealism is not merely intellectual, the product of a meditation in a studio, but is enlived by the elements of dream and fantasy, infused with the magic of fable and myth.
Historically, Surrealism as an art movement dates back between the end of the First World War and the beginning of the Second, so it should be all over now. Nevertheless, we are now witnessing a revival of the movement as an imaginative alternative to total abstractionism and to a kind of Realism which is far too objective and sociological. Even politically active painters, such as Margonari, found in Surrealism a more suitable way to express their protest or their fears regarding social problems such as over-population and environmental pollution. Perghem Gelmi’s luxuriant nature can be seen in contrast with the everyday chaos. If Surrealism represented “a machine to overturn the soul”, “the son of frenzy and shadow” (Aragon) getting very close to a sort of delirium, its modern phase appears to be less automatized, less dream-like, less subconscious, more rationalized. The process has somewhat lost the charm of a fresh discovery. We are standing far from Henri Bergson and we know that, no matter what, we need to come to terms with time and space categories.
As a result, Perghem Gelmi takes his Surrealist visions with a pinch of salt. His paintings are carefully organized and rooted in a distinct culture, although his original inspiration draws from a “stream of consciousness”, from a Joyce-like chaos, from a Proust-like reverie.
There is one element in Perghem Gelmi’s art, which is both stimulating and disconcerting: the abundance of eyes, which populates many Perghem Gelmi’s paintings. They jut out of the lance-like leaves of his tropical plants, they can be found among the flourishes of ornaments and the Art Nouveau paraphernalia, among the tropical fish and in his craziest fantasies. The well defined, precisely drawn eyes are there as a sign of reason, they stand for the artist’s vision, pondering on his creations or prying on the viewers, who in turn are made restless by this open stare which can be at times ironical, meditative, terror-striken, depending on what the artist is feeling in the moment of creation.
The vibrant colours, the inks, the strange creative force, the novelty of discovery, the mastery over his art and the freedom of his expression are all elements that make the paintings in these exhibition worthwhile and significant. Perghem Gelmi tells us about his dreams, as someone who, waking up the morning after, has the impression of having actually lived them. Still anguished by the memory of violent acts and feelings, he looks anxiously among friends and loved ones for interpretations which may touch on the mystery without clearly revealing it. This is exactly what the artist is asking of us here today. We have realized that Surrealism is not a non-reality but only another means to represent reality as it is, a means of discovering more about it.

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