Eolo Perfido - and how to portray the weaknesses of an epoch -
Augusto Pieroni
Man Ray used to say: “I paint what I cannot photograph, and I photograph what I cannot paint.” Born in France in 1972, but living in Rome, Eolo Perfido has been a cartoon victim – so to speak – ever since his childhood. When he began his career as a professional photographer he was still a fan of hi-tech gothic cartoonists, Juan Gimnez and Moebius in particular, and I strongly believe he still is. Drawing was not his favourite means of expression, though; photography became his native language instead. In a way we can still perceive a whiff of, say, Metal Hurlant in his portraits or his creative series. Densely textured backdrops, the often lifeless scenarios, the very appearance of people – sometimes cyborg-like, other times nightmarish – these are but some of the features drawn generously from the cartoonists of the late Seventies. But, though a rich and yet haphazard borrower, Perfido does not quote directly from his sources.
As a professional image-maker, his attitude might so often be bent to the needs of the clients that his inner force and his wild side might seldom break free. But let’s try to invert this notion, revert the gaze: why couldn’t we suppose that Eolo Perfido chose commercial photography because of his love for cartoons in the fist place? Why couldn’t his style derive from a knack for such hyper defined silk smooth, fetish-finish bodily features as those designed by his heroes? Why shouldn’t we conjecture that for Perfido every female model is potentially a Lorna (Alphonso Azpiri’s celebrated character), and every male sitter is an implicit Akira (Katsuhiro Otomo’s psionic creature)? The metallic luminescence of many of his images could be a symptom of some kind of kinship. A certain post atomic anguish still lingers either in the setting of many pictures, or in some stranded facial expression. Here the visage of a man is inconspicuously yet unmistakeably made up, there an overlapping layer of thickly written words – excerpted from the diary of a saint – tattoo a she-priest’s portrait as thinly as a spider web would. We are nearly into decadence. The first time I saw Perfido's portfolios I found myself thinking hard about Floria Sigismondi’s videos – Marilyn Manson’s and White Stripes’s just to bring a few back to mind – or even more helplessly to the new savages of glamour advertising: Erwin Olaf or Helen von Unwert tipping the iceberg. I could have confused his theatrical cruelty with Joel Peter Witkin’s Grand Guignol, but where would I find the corpse? I could have gone the wrong way by coupling his, with Lachapelle’s sort of morbid artificiality; but what would I do with Perfido’s emotional consistence? Yes, after a look at his portraits, both staged and candid, I had to admit how thoroughly he searches for a sparkle of humanity in the eyes of his sitters, even if the format requires cruel, puppet like chrysalises. Therefore I chose another way to read him.
I eventually had to acknowledge in Perfido’s works the presence of a mediterranean counterbalance to the gloomy moods of many of his sources. There is in fact a sunny side in his photographs: an architectural balance – both compositional and emotional – that is tantamount to a sort of complicated serenity. I couldn’t explain this feature, not least to myself, were it not for a habit, a custom, perhaps a compulsion I partake in, as an Italian, with him. Our country’s visual heritage is, in fact, underpinned by some deeply entrenched sense of order. “Pondus” was the Latin word that meant both architectural weight and moral dignity (hey, wait, Architecture and Morality: I have that record; it’s a 1981 Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark!). Anyhow: cathedrals, amphitheatres, temples, paintings; many creative and communicative artefacts around us, here in Italy, speak in terms of order. Not a Calvinist, stark minimalism, though; rather the wild yet unbent rules of Nature translated into forms and histories.
In spite of this dialectic, not many months ago I was recently confronted with a portfolio of Perfido’s that immediately made me wonder again about his roots of reference. Propaganda is, in fact, a coherent series produced a couple of years ago, which deserves a little attention at this time. At first sight it conveys a harsh sense of violence. Then the photographs start releasing a distinct scent of control, elegance perhaps even beauty. Expressiveness and mastery, flare and self-control are merged into a whole defying any attempt to tell them apart.
As for the subjects, a set of characters drawn from America’s shadiest ordinary life, appear on the fore of heavily vignetted shots. A silent scream is represented in each and every one of them. The photographs are therefore emotionally overloaded but still there is something cool about them. Bare and tinged backgrounds (crafted by Eolo Perfido himself), cold spotlights, sharp focussing, precise setups; we could never mistake these photographs for snapshots or portraits. Whatever the mental vantage point we accord them: narrative or conceptual, still these images appear to me as a set of symbolic emblems. Although often pointing their gaze at the camera, none of the living beings portrayed can see: a strap of stained gauze blinds them, making every sitter into a lowercase Rudolf Schwarzkogler (the Viennese performer who used to bind and inflict severe mutilation on himself and eventually died in 1969 at the age of 29).
Every subject is dressed up in an ordinary fashion: blue collar, orange detention uniform, white KKK blouse, stars and stripes mini-skirt, black clergyman, camouflage patterned military uniform, light blue dressing gown. Furthermore, every subject is fitted with objects pertaining to the semantic sphere of American culture, politics and society: we can easily spot an electric chair, a shopping cart, a mirror, broken toys, a laptop, a gun, a giant bucket of popcorn. The whole series looks rather more like a pack of tarot cards, than a gallery of people; each card associated with a negative clich of the American Way of Life as seen from the inverted perspective of the “others”. It’s like trying, unsuccessfully, to wake up from the American Dream as if from a nightmare. It’s not by chance that the Star Spangled Banner is always differently implied, yet every time unfailingly availed. Eolo Perfido, in fact, seems to be engaged in a new, yet quite oblique, reflection on the “Americans”. What is it that blinds those characters? What is it that making them all scream and look quite like a Francis Bacon painting? What is casting these uneven shadows, as if concealing a homemade scandal? Why can’t we skim over all this awkwardness, constrained as we are instead into this hallucinatory experience by an all-over crisp focus? While the subjects have their eyes closed we should be opening ours.
In this series two structures merge: on the one hand Perfido’s capacity to detect and portray the weaknesses of an epoch, by creating images pervaded by a stinging geopolitical awareness and filled with the living symbols of a decadent Empire. On the other hand, though, his narrative habit never wears out: he builds up a stage as unsettling as any vernacular home basement, injecting effective expressiveness in a fictional setting. The two halves of his creative self act like Siamese twin film directors, but the language they speak is not that of filmmaking, nor is that of cartoons. Photography is a powerful media and it’s perfect for Perfido. It is as poignant as a film and as dreamy as a strip of comics, but combines these two features with the hypnotic obsessiveness of the freeze frame. I devised a metaphor that could possibly work, therefore I’ll share it with my patient readers: Perfido’s reading of the U.S. sounds a bit like Jimi Hendrix’s performance of the American National Anthem at Woodstock in 1969: a violated, incandescent, obscene version and yet a necessary, absolute, perhaps almost classical one.
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