From the catalogue of the exhibition “Michelangelo Perghem Gelmi”, Palazzo Trentini, Trento, May 2003, TEMI Editions.
Courtesy of the Presidency of the Provincial Council of the Autonomous Province of Trento.

The figurative Pseudo-Surrealism of Perghem Gelmi
Critical text by Maurizio Scudiero.

Considering the general situation of Michelangelo Perghem Gelmi’s oeuvre, described so well by Elisabetta Staudacher in the preceding essay, I believe it is very important to analyse the most significative (and popular) period of the artist, the period defined, rightly or wrongly, as “Surrealist”. And I would immediately stop on the word “wrongly”, as in my opinion the artist was not influenced by the same conceptual motives of the Surrealist movement, nor was he part of the movement either in a cultural or in a chronological way. For this reason, we need to analyse the original motivations which lie at the basis of his body of works, so different from any other Trentino artist. That is why we need to analyse the actual reasons behind this period so original and detached from the Trentino artistic scene. Firstly, we must keep in mind his solid cultural education, the initial influence of Paulucci and his link with South American culture. We must then remember his profession, his engineering studies with a strong inclination towards architecture, in order to open up to all aspects of art. All these themes were combined with his special ability of singling out the details in a complex context, thus forming his original “Weltanschauung”, a vision of the world imbued with a subtle irony. His taste for irony generates Perghem Gelmi’s “detachment” from reality through a “distant” or rather “aloof” point of view, detached from everyday life. It is this attitude of detachment which enables him to identify the dissonant details, either too small or too big to be noticed by the masses. This aspect is confirmed by the titles of many of his works, which are apparently shocking, but which are always in harmony with the paintings they are related to. As a matter of fact, the peculiarity clearly emerging from this series of works, besides his rare and blatant Magritte tributes, is his “unsettling” point of view, his play with the semantics of words or his attributing to them an excessive importance – Perghem Gelmi may have possibly heard of a book written by the Trans-mental poets Krucenyk and Klebnikov, published in Moscow in 1913, entitled “Slovo kak takovoe”, that is “The word as it is”. The result is far from a Surrealist effect conjuring up dreamy mental landscapes, tinted with pessimism and phobia. On the contrary, his works are based on an ironical description of the vices and virtues of the world around him. The artist, a fine observer, puts reality through a lens, in order to discover the “weakest link” or at least the most humorous one. The figure that comes to mind is that of “The Collector”, who is portrayed as he is absorbed in the contemplation of a girls’ pubis in a Modigliani painting. Secondly, his talent for quoting other works can be seen as a further key to interpret his development as a painter during the 1980s. At a certain point, from the heights of his academic training, he began to play with all the movements that he encountered during his studies. He mixed different styles and avant-guarde movements of the 20th century, clearly with an inclinaton towards Surrealism. However, his intentions were not intellectual but he used this style as a “decorative model”. Psycho-pathological connotations and anguished feelings for the dissolution of time – “time forever flowing and never coming back” being a leit motif of Surrealism often represented through melting, handless clocks - are completely absent in Perghem Gelmi’s paintings. So are horrifying metamorphosis and psychotic nightmares. This absence contributes to place Perghem Gelmi’s artistic production on a completely different level, far from the Surrealist movement, in a dimension which we may well define as “over-real”, an over-objective perspective, very much rooted in reality, which the artist operates on through his language made up by a “complexity of meanings”. This can be regarded almost as a sociological attitude, that could well be defined as Perghem Gelmi’s “Sociologism” – a joke, naturally. However, it is clear that since the beginning of the 1970s, from his atelier overlooking Piazza Venezia, previously belonging to Umberto Moggioli, Perghem Gelmi observed the Catholic, bigoted Trento in a politically-correct, dictatorial greyness. Here we can definitely detect a certain “Situationism”, devoid of dream-like connotations and full of satirical accents and open critique towards the institutions of his time. The key to fully comprehend this new course in his style is actually the big painting which depicts all the Trentino politicians of his time (1985), serving the double tribute to the contemporary spiritual authority, personified by the archibishop Alessandro Maria Gottardi, and the ancient authority, dating back to a time when spiritual and temporal spheres were united, here represented by the Prince-Bishop Bernardo Clesio, embodiment of both Church and State. From this work onwards, his contacts with contemporary society got more and more frequent, such as in his tribute to Guido Polo. His insights into reality are always guided by a sense of “disenchanted emotional distance” from his subjects, in order to capture those “over-real” aspects not immediately visible if you are in haste, the usual modern attitude to reality. On the contrary, Perghem Gelmi’s attitude is resorting to an apparently cold and photographic descriptive manner, which turns his works into a reportage album of his trips to the East (China) and to South America, while his local environment becomes more and more stiff and hypocritical, more and more detached. In his late travel notes Perghem Gelmi created the last great series of his works, characterized by the always clear observation of apparently banal details (straw baskets, hats, chairs etc.): a sort of “Semantic Minimalism”, which takes us back to the origins of his art, in seach of the “true meaning of things”, which is finally the meaning of life.

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