AXOLOTL

Peter Peri is a London based artist of Hungarian ancestry who works predominantly in the mediums of painting, sculpture and drawing. In Budapest he will present a group of abstract drawings on paper.

The exhibition's title is taken from Julio Cortozar's 1956 short story in which a visitor to a Paris zoo becomes fascinated with a tiny species of Salamander from Mexico, the Axolotl. Gazing into the creature's eyes the visitor's encounter becomes increasingly intense until he finds himself metamorphosed — horrifyingly 'buried alive' in the body of the Axolotl. He exchanges his former human life of freedom and movement for immobile observation, becoming trapped in the dark aquarium's 'final solitude'.

Within Peri's austere geometric compositions a multitude of fine pencil lines coalesce. The rhythms they produce are organic and unruly, lines taper and overrun borders as if somehow suspicious of fixity. Looking at them we are drawn into a close physical engagement and become aware of the singularity of each line — that each is precisely isolated from the next. In Cortozar's story the visitor understands that the Axolotyl's secret will is 'to abolish space and time with an indifferent immobility' — correspondingly the intricate, labor intensive nature of Peri's drawings suggest that time, as much as space, is being measured and our perception of it slowed. We become aware of a concrete, almost alien quality in their composition that stands apart but also attracts — perhaps something like the eyes of the Axolotl.