Richard Peralta
Contemporary Art

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Some painters seem to emerge from non-conformism; they do not want to know about the past or about insurrectionary aesthetic movements. But there are others, very few by the way - who paint under an "ideology", defining themselves as iconoclasts, dissatisfied by the social and political chaos, by the disorder, the lack of government and by the passivity and inertia of cultural life. In this scenario we have met Richard Peralta, first through his works in some collective exhibitions; now we have approached his workshop, where we have found him tied to his simplicity and unleashing his "aggressiveness" against formalisms and theatrical poses.

His work has immediately led us to a European painter, Bosch (1540), that anti-Catholic, polemic, cursed artist, who created iconographic novelties, images and symbols of dreamlike, morbid spaces, characters within a complex compositional figuration, as a predecessor of surrealism. And as if he were the reincarnation, Richard Peralta appears, with his visionary charge in this country, in this city of invisible aesthetic obscurities, painting his unreal colours, drawing with colour figures and symbols (animals, men, insects, meat) with absolute independence, clear, contrasted, brilliant, walking towards insistent plastic definitions, within an expressive dialectic, perhaps because he is located in subterranean worlds and lives with unsatisfied spirits, like many painters committed to the art of life.

The surrealist, expressionist forms approach this perverse reality, and give him the data for his experimental works. In this search, which many others only proclaim, but do not practice, Peralta is looking and feeling the man and his miseries to turn his painting into a variegated and resolute drawing, immobilising his characters with red, his favourite colour.

In his medium-sized canvases move corpses, twisted men, faces, hands, insects, strange combinations of moaning beings; all this creates disconcerted, sometimes sordid sensations in a form of plastic psychoanalysis.

In this experimental process he uses various nuances: oils, collages, paper, sculptures in blocks and in plaster paste; thus homunculus bodies are born which will awaken the common and sensitive spectator. In Peralta's work, expressive painting is important as a satirical theatrical act, transmitting his chaotic affective stages in a disorderly manner. This is his pictorial grammar.

Fortunately he is authentic and very devoted to his work and to art. May he continue with his demons, with his transgressor spirit.

Cusco July 2001
Manuel Gibaja