“Stirrings”, March 1974 – Year 4 - n. 3
Critical review by Mario Ulivi.

PERGHEM.
Michelangelo Perghem Gelmi, an extremely prolific and creative Trentino painter, expresses himself with an original plastic approach and reaches extravagant surrealist solutions. Let’s take a look at some of his works.
The flower figure of “Fiore n.1” is made up of a stylized central aureole of spear-like leaves and soft bananas, crowned by other more pointed spikes that seem to be made of wrought iron. A staring eye presides over the whole composition with a strange, powerful, obsessed fixed gaze. The feeling of horror is emphazised by the hair, the beard, the lashes, all standing up as if electrified by a horrible vision. The terrifying mood is represented through a soft flowery decoration.
In “The Cane-brake”, the barren, ascending movement of the branches is softened by a delicate canopy of leaves. Amidst the greenery, a sweet and bewildered pair of eyes is giving the viewer a hopeful stare in captivity. We find the same leit motif of the central eye form in “The Skin Ball”. This time it is present in the grotesque caricature of a Don Quixote transformed into a puppet. Sometimes Perghem Gelmi treats his compositions with the perfect rigour of geometry, at other times he sets them afire with the incandescent tones of splendid tropical plants.
The mixed use of oil and ink techniques represent the original artistic and poetic inner world of the artist. He treads into an imaginary world, onto which he transfers his feelings and symbols, turning them into refined aesthetic games, a dense allegorical construction which first astonishes viewers with its strangeness and then convinces them with its strict inner logic, its levity and its clever imagination. For instance, in “Living Nature”, the artist depicts life’s pleasures through the soft contours of a feminine face, geometrically pointed and streaked with wavy hair, and her soft breasts. The focus of attention is represented by her enormous mouth and her estatic gaze, a gaze which seems to anticipate the delicious aroma of the liqueur she is holding in the big goblet in front of her. In this fairly complex composition you can also see a globe in the foreground, a delicate still life with flowers in a frame in the background and a seaside scene with some plants on the distant horizon. The whole composition is further enhanced by elegant, flowing ribbons resembling a coat of arms. It is painted on ceramic tiles, diligently made by the painter, that in this case serve as a symbol of imagination’s tight grip on reality, ascending to a more ideal dream-like dimension.

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