Visiting Alfonso Artiaco’s gallery in Naples for Achille Perilli’s solo exhibition means immersing oneself in an intellectual challenge that has lasted for over seventy years. We are not faced with reassuring geometry, the product of rulers and compasses, but with a systematic subversion of Euclidean logic. The Roman artist, who passed away in 2021, spent his life “dismantling” space, and this exhibition retraces the most intense moments of his career, where the mark becomes the structure of rebellious thought.
Achille Perilli solo show, installation view at Alfonso Artiaco, Napoli, ph. Grafiluce, courtesy Alfonso Artiaco
Perilli, together with colleagues such as Dorazio and Turcato, was the driving force behind the revolution known as Forma 1. In a post-war Italy divided between committed realism and lyrical abstraction, he chose the most difficult path: form as politics, the sign as pure freedom. While his early work was influenced by Lionello Venturi and the energy of the European avant-garde, the selection on display takes us to the heart of his maturity, that crucial moment between the late 1960s and the 1970s when the artist declared war on Renaissance perspective. While in the early stages of his career his mark was influenced by his stays in Paris and the study of masters such as Kandinsky, it was with the text Indagine sulla prospettiva (Investigation into Perspective, 1969) that the artist formalised his detachment from the coercive devices of the gaze: it is not just a title, but an indictment of optical illusion. Perilli replaces the window on the world with the device of the labyrinth.
Achille Perilli solo show, installation view at Alfonso Artiaco, Napoli, ph. Grafiluce, courtesy Alfonso Artiaco
On the walls of the gallery, we see spatial boxes that open and close simultaneously, figures that defy gravity and force the eye to perform mental gymnastics. It is what he himself called the “crazy image”: an architecture that cannot exist in physical reality, but which vibrates with absolute coherence on the surface of the canvas. Continuing along the path, we sense how, since the 1980s and 1990s, the rigor of the mark has been overtaken by a new chromatic urgency. Color no longer simply fills spaces but becomes the agent that disrupts volumes. The shades become bright, almost acidic, creating a depth that does not recede but seems to come towards the viewer. It is here that Perilli’s research touches on the concept of “geometric irrationality”: a geometry that has lost its patience, that no longer wants to explain the order of the world but to celebrate its ambiguity and infinity.
Achille Perilli solo show, installation view at Alfonso Artiaco, Napoli, ph. Grafiluce, courtesy Alfonso Artiaco
A fundamental counterpoint is provided by the focus on works on paper, covering a period from the late 1940s to the late 1970s. These sheets are not mere preparatory studies, but privileged places where thought settles. From his early experiments linked to Forma 1 to the unstable structures from later years, paper proves to be an autonomous space of construction in which order and disorder coexist in a precarious balance. In these works, Perilli’s visionary vocation is clear: an imaginary space devoid of hierarchies in which perception constantly oscillates between logical rigor and pure intuition.
Achille Perilli solo show, installation view at Alfonso Artiaco, Napoli, ph. Grafiluce, courtesy Alfonso Artiaco
In the exhibition rooms, the works are presented as a series of minimal passages, sequences that proliferate without ever reaching a conclusive synthesis, maintaining the volume in a state of controlled precariousness. This “paradoxical geometry” also draws on his experiences in avant-garde theatre and literature, disciplines that have always pushed Perilli to look beyond the two-dimensionality of the painting. The exhibition at Alfonso Artiaco thus restores the stature of an artist who was able to transform bewilderment into a necessary condition of seeing. Perilli invites us to lose ourselves in a visual field where signs no longer describe the world, but become the movement of the soul and mental direction, confirming the relevance of research that has been able to make the rigidity of geometry fluid, turning it into a device capable of questioning the infinite.
Info:
Achille Perilli
19/01 – 28/02/2026
Alfonso Artiaco
Piazza dei Martiri 58, Napoli
www.alfonsoartiaco.com/en
Art Curator and Art Advisor, graduated in Visual Arts and Cultural Mediation, with Master in Curatorial Practices, born in 1995, lives in Naples. He collaborates with Galleries and Independent Spaces, his research is mainly focused on Emerging Painting, with a careful and inclined gaze also on other forms of aesthetic language.
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