John Perreault Seascapes
Daniel Rothbart
John Perreault seascapes capture something very essential
about the sea. They are works that embody the quicksilver changes of the ocean,
encompassing both its spatial and metaphorical complexity. Through calligraphic
marks with sand and binder, painted on found seascapes and plywood panels,
Perreault evokes natural rhythms of the tide, brine on the crest of a wave, the
play of light on water and the movement of the sea as it covers and depletes
the shore. By combining unlikely genres and techniques he attains a gestalt
effect, which is close to the spirit of the sea.
Found Seascapes
During a 2003 C-Shack residency in the Provincetown dunes,
Perreault began to make paintings with Elmer’s Glue and sand. Later that year,
at a Long Island yard sale, he bought a paint-by-number seascape over which he
dripped a pattern of sandy impasto with repetitive circular movements. The
results were highly intriguing, and Perreault began to
name="OLE_LINK2">ply yard sales
and thrift stores for seascapes. For the most part he selected banal works
realized by mediocre painters to brighten up hotel rooms on Long Island Sound.
Perreault would then gather sand. Most often he uses local
sands, but recent works have included sand from his travels, including exotic
black sand from Hawaii that once issued from a volcano. By way of his circular
patterning, Perreault draws the viewer’s attention from illusionistic deep
space of the found painting to these linear marks. But the sandy impasto is
more than a line or a pattern, constituting a sculptural presence in the work
with corporeal forms and shadows that emerge from the seascape of the ocean
ground.
Already in late 1940s, Jackson Pollock was exploring the
relationship between his dripping paintings and the sea, alluding to it in the
title of his painting Full Fathom Five. But where Pollock implies depth through
chromatic diversity and layering, Perreault drips monotone impasto, drawing the
viewer’s perception to patterns, forms, and shadows. Together with the found
seascape in the background he orchestrates a dialogue between rolling waves,
rocks, beaches, and the sky, with rapidly executed drippings akin in their way
to the spray or frothy foam of the ocean that is both wild and uncontrollable.
In nature, it is the force of waves that grind stone to sand, creating
Perreault’s art material. By combining these elements, Perreault establishes an
interesting rapport between reality and illusion.
Plywood Seascapes
For other works Perreault selects plywood panels as grounds
for his seascape paintings. The panels privilege natural growth rings in the
wood. The cross-grain patterns of the plywood at times resemble the concentric
circles in a pool of water and at others the complex movements of the ocean
waves seen from above. In the plywood seascape series, Perreault uses dark sand
from Long Island, which is discolored by past oil spills. The sand tells a
story of ecological imbalance.
Plywood like the sand is both natural and artificial, corrupted
with resins that bind it together. I recall a boyhood visit to the Weyerhauser
lumber mill in Oregon, where I saw logs placed on oversized lathe spindles from
which they were shaved into veneer. The weight and substance of the tree was
quickly reduced to a flimsy membrane, waiting to be laminated to other veneers
to obtain an artificial strength. So plywood, despite the beauty of its grain,
represents a violate nature.
Similarly, the black sand of Long Island is intermingled
with the oily by-products of consumption and waste. Its black pigment is
derived from the local petroleum spills of pleasure boats which, although
contained in scope, pollute the ocean, endangering marine life and birds. For
Perreault, the use of tainted materials to represent nature effects a certain
correction of human transgressions.
Perreault has a longstanding interest in mystical Judaism,
feeling a particular affinity with the Luriac creation story of vessels in the
Cabala. According to tradition, ten vessels were filled with Divine light.
Certain lower vessels were overwhelmed by the luminosity of their contents and
broke into pieces. As a result, Divine light was intermingled with kelippot,
the potsherds of its vessels, resulting in light bound to shadow. To rectify
this problem, God initiated a process of Tikkun, or “correction.” Perreault
effects such a correction by restoring natural beauty and complexity to wood
and sand that have been tainted by the hand of Man.
Mended Stones
Another body of work on view consists of “Mended Stones.”
They are rounded stones, found by Perreault along the seashore, that are broken
and glued back together again. Two early conceptual works of the early 1970’s,
intended for the garden at Wave Hill, embody Perreault’s complex relationship
to nature. One consisted of writing a one-line poem in the grass with lye. Lye
would kill the grass in the space of the poem. Perreault also proposed to paint
an entire tree, from top to bottom, which again would ultimately have the
effect of killing it. Neither piece was ever realized.
The death and rebirth of nature as art in these works
reflects the shadow of creativity. Perreault implies that destruction is always
present in the act of creation. Indeed, Perreault’s works are much more in
keeping with the at times brutal reality of nature than most of the prettified
interventions realized by artists for pastoral environments. But Perreault’s
transformation of nature, by depleting part of the natural environment,
heighten our awareness to what remains present. As in his current seascapes,
Perreault establishes a fascinating rapport between abstraction and reality (or
its depiction).
Breaking stones may seem like a primal or even primitive
gesture, but the tool Perreault is crafting takes hold of our consciousness
like a Zen koan. Perreault’s establishment of a duality within these stones
clarifies our understanding of pristine nature. Mended stones also speak to a
mythic nature with its dualities of masculine or feminine and creation and
destruction, which runs like a deep ocean current in the unconscious.
