MICKI PELLERANO: By Sapphire and Sword

Opening Reception Saturday March 28th 7-10pm
March 28th through April 26th Open Saturday and Sunday 3pm to 8pm or by appointment.

Live With Animals Gallery is proud to present By Sapphire and Sword: Films and Works on Paper by Micki Pellerano.

Pellerano’s draughtsmanship fixates upon apocalyptic sequences, arcane rituals, and bizarre fantasy. Baroque Christian iconographies - integrated into the artist’s spiritual vocabulary by his Cuban heritage - cohabit harmoniously with a taste for the decadent and pagan. Taut muscled figures command his pieces with histrionic postures, generating force-fields of chaotic plasma. Scenes of devastation charged with a dreamlike erotic quality ravage ancient temples housing grotesque idols.

Well known as an esotericist, one can detect from his work a sense of mediumistic struggle. Diaphanous forms meld into one another or materialize, often with a harsh or clumsy attitude, from aetheric substance. A marked air of violence punctuates the drawings as though the artist were battling his own mortal limitations to bring forth intimations of ineffable idea.

Looming to the right of the gallery, the emanations of a video projector pulse behind a black shroud of a theater drape where a levitating Edwardian archway marks the entrance to a makeshift cinema. A screen therein displays a continuous loop of Pellerano’s Hermetic Trilogy. In his film - rather like his performances - ritual and myth are prominent. Gesture and symbol assume the dominant role over story or character. Yet a scholarly erudition permeates the stream of cryptic symbolism and inscrutable ceremonies enacted by nude subjects with the precise deliberation of somnambulists.
Pellerano received conservatory training at the Experimental Theater Wing of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts where he was influenced deeply by Grotowski and Artaud. He combined his knowledge of theatrical formulas to create a unique method by which to communicate philosophical abstraction and effect magical change. He evolved to adopt film as his preferred medium and later draughtsmanship while maintaining a consistent repertoire of performance art true to his pedigree.

By Sapphire and Sword is a representation of Micki Pellerano’s command over a singular language of symbol, couched in a richly ornamented body of work, painfully detailed and masterfully crafted. He is at times depraved, at times reverent to the monuments of Classicism and Piety. However, he is always truthful to the driving spiritual hunger that governs him throughout his examination of various disciplines.