Antoine Perrot

Because everything with Perrot is playful, droll, affectionately (rather than harshly) parodistic, crazily constructed—a kind of Dada “lite” (stripped its rabid avant-gardism). So if the artist therefore tends to vanish behind the random interplay of these readymade colors, he does so a little like Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire Cat : Perrot’s evanescent smile hangs in the colorful air of every work, just as it does between every title and its deliberately skewed English translation. And if these paintings/objects call more for in vivo usage than for in situ representation, it is not so much the thoughtful, well-ordered usage of earnest players as the comic, indescribable games invented by the same Lewis Carroll, stripped of meaning and customary rules but not of purpose and enthusiasm, whether it be the Queen of Heart’s croquet game or the hunting of the snark. Democracy of color is still a vast, zany human comedy.
In this respect, the wonderful idea of Fortune Pictures probably reduces all contemporary art to its true modesty : neither world-transforming nor life-changing nor even happiness-promising (to allude to Stendhal’s definition of beauty). But maybe, now and then, it brings the good fortune of a joyously egalitarian, chance encounter between stochastic artist and common superstitions, for once viewed with affection. Because the real charm of these paintings by Perrot is that, bringing neither promise nor fanfare, they sometimes manage to make us feel fortunate—like a carefree child once again—to be momentarily freed from the crushing, deathly alternative of having either to transform the world or to scorn it.

Pierre Zaoui

Translated from the French by Deke Dusinberre