Casey Kaplan
Il sole come un gatto is Diego Perrone’s first institutional exhibition in Naples (Asti, 1970). For the occasion, the artist has conceived a site-specific project of new productions for the first-floor halls of Palazzo Caracciolo d’Avellino. The exhibition spans different languages and media, moving freely among some of the motifs and formal repertoires that have shaped Perrone’s practice for over twenty years. From moving image to environmental and sound installation, from photography to sculpture, the works on view compose an ideal, synesthetic landscape that seems to render the portrait of a transitory instant.
A cat, falling from a height into a courtyard, adjusts its body mid-air. Its paws curl inward, ready to soften the final impact. The curious and necessary choreography of its body is decompressed in a slow-motion video that gives the exhibition its title. The subject—a cat—contains a layered symbolic stratification spanning epochs and cultures: from the sacredness of ancient Egypt to the contemporary proliferation of social media reels. Here it becomes an animot, an alien and feline creature, both worldly and cosmic, which in its nakedness appears as a reflection and mirroring of alterity—or a self-portrait of the artist.
A glimpse into the estrangement between self and world that, in the mortal encounter-clash, generates a muted and pathetic poetics of moving absurdity. Diego Perrone’s works resemble Perelà, the man of smoke, sustained by the incessant narration of reality, descending from a chimney into the world with his light essence. As in Pendio piovoso frusta la lingua, 2026—a reiteration of a 2010 sculpture—this silky sculptural body extends majestically like a peacock offended by captivity, monstrous and animal, tracing an unfathomable landscape. Il Codice di Perelà is the elected (and forgotten) novel of the Futurist movement: the panegyric of technique dissolves into an invisible figure. The image that surpasses thought in speed lashes the tongue.
When asked, “What is poetry?”, Derrida chooses the image of the hedgehog: “an animal thrown onto the road, absolute, solitary, curled up within itself.” A completed gesture—the poetic one—renouncing culture without losing it, “crossing the road” with a “learned ignorance.” The poetic attempt crosses the road of grand discourses and risks being crushed by them. “It is that preverbal entity which, while demanding the word, simultaneously resists it.”
Il sole come un gatto by Diego Perrone is a crossing under a sun that is not metaphysical and absolute, but animal, mute, and unfathomable—enigmatically condensing, with tenderness and ferocity, space and time into poetry.
For more information, visit Fonzaione Morra Greco