New Orleans painter Keith Perelli will unveil a new series of post-Katrina paintings at Found Gallery in September of 2007.

Perelli is a native New Orleanian, most of his family living in Chalmette prior to the storm. While teaching at the New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts by day, he spends his spare time and summers painting in his shotgun home within walking distance of the campus. The shotgun house, a New Orleans staple, can be seen being tossed around in a grim stratosphere in several of his new paintings, without the magical sense of justice prevailing as in Dorothy’s case. In addition, his new work has also focused on abandoned fishing vessels, trapped against a sparse, lonely, and invisible horizon.

In what the artist has referred to as a blessing, the completion of this series of paintings represents a grueling and burdensome slogging through the mud, a weary population consistently being reminded from all angles of the sick, sad, and slow Sysiphusian struggle of the region’s denizens. The incredibly vibrant flora and fauna of his earlier work have recently wilted. Though still alive, the plants in these recent paintings clearly loom much more elegiac.

While Perelli’s work has always found him confronting difficult subject matter both personally and in a more universal manner, his more recent exhibition ‘Empire’ and his upcoming paintings ‘Return’ reveal an increasingly monochromatic existence.

This past year Mr. Perelli exhibited for the first time at Art Basel in Miami with Steve Martin Gallery, and ‘Return’ marks the maiden voyage to the West Coast to exhibit his vastly moving work.

Opening reception to feature music by Modus Vivendi’s Subatomic Sound System.

You can see some of Keith’s work online at:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/perelli

You can visit his website at:
http://www.keithperelli.com/

Participating Artist(s):

Imagery from Keith Perelli: Return