Perry Hall – Decalcomanic, Asemic & Cymatic Forms

Live Paintings – Perry Hall

Perry Hall’s paintings use a variety of process techniques from Decalcomania, a method originally favoured by the Surrealists to the sonification of oils or acrylics. In the former, patterns are generated by transferring a high viscosity paint from one surface to another, and then pulling the two surfaces apart. The resultant textural figures are not random but instead form a characteristic pattern of fine branching structures, filigree networks and dehiscent structures. In Perry’s ‘2008’ paintings the Decalcomanic procedure is created with a radial action to create structures similar to dendrochronological tree-ring patterns. At other times the textures, aligned in parallel, give the impression of a kind of asemic calligraphy.

Perry’s sound drawings, single frames taken from HD videos, bare all the hallmark patterns of sonically transduced liquids – with lattice arrangements and organic and periodic tessellated patterns.

The highlight of the portfolio, arguably though, is the ‘live paintings’ series which documents videos of the dynamics of paint, including fluid vortexes, convectional processes and turbulence. Abstracted from environment context these images might have been derived from space probe photography. The wave structures and vortexes are identical in form to those found moving across the surfaces of the great gaseous planets of the Solar system.