Casting a crisis, painting a cat, looking out a window

Michael Lett gallery presents an exhibition of paintings by Oliver Perkins. These works, produced in Perkins’ Lyttleton studio during the national COVID-19 lockdown from April–May 2020, continue a suite of processes for the artist that explore and disrupt the parameters of contemporary painting practice.

Perkins takes the constituent elements of painting production as material for aggregation and intervention. Seen and unseen materials like canvas, cardboard, dye, rabbit skin glue, ink, stretcher bars, dowel, and staples are employed as actors in a network of painting practice to be redistributed and realigned, offering new modes of being with and experiencing painted objects.

Perkins’ works share a suggestion that a painting isn’t something that is made or done—an autonomous and inert object that leaves the studio in a state of completion. Rather, they are objects bound (sometimes quite literally) in a continual state of happening. And so the various inserts, implants, ropes and strings that Perkins employs become means to interrupt and emphasize this constant action.

Oliver Perkins
August
2020
Ink, acrylic, size, and painted rope on canvas
1600 x 1200mm

Oliver Perkins
White Mice
2020
Ink, acrylic, and size on canvas
550 x 600mm

Oliver Perkins
Actant
2020
Ink and size on canvas over cardboard
740 x 750mm

Oliver Perkins
Herring
2020
Ink, acrylic, size, and painted rope on primed canvas
620 x 510mm

Oliver Perkins
Carrion
2020
Ink, acrylic, and size on canvas
430 x 380mm

“These paintings all actively revel in the process of revealing and concealing, they veil certain conditions, only to open up other incidental marks for discovery. In fact, it may be better to think of these paintings as intermediary objects, precisely because they privilege folds, absences, and adjustments.”
– Hamish Win

Oliver Perkins
Projectors
2020
Ink, acrylic, size, and painted rope on canvas
650 x 1000mm

Oliver Perkins
Dora
2020
Ink, acrylic, size, and rope on canvas

Oliver Perkins
Futura
2020
Ink, size, acrylic, and oil paint on canvas
470 x 330mm

Oliver Perkins
The Argument
2020
Ink, acrylic, size, dowel, and rope on canvas
530 x 360mm

“As with all Perkins’ works, the paintings possess an immediate, intuitive rightness. The physical elements and colours are in easy balance. Their formal restraint, not to say simplicity, inevitably draws you in close, summoning you to attend to every visible surface and edge, every quirk of the materials and their combination.”

– Francis McWhannell