John Perello is fully aware of his past. His artistic expression grows out of it and marks the heart of his oeuvre. The artist works with his memories, his roots, his emotions, his life in general, and applies his very own history as the most important artistic tool. That is why it feels like a natural and logical step, that Perello returned to the biomorphic forms of his earliest artistic approaches within his latest murals in 2018. The abstract compositions, which marked the artists paintings beginning of 1990, slowly replaced the famous tags as painting backgrounds and made a shining comeback as the focus of his gigantic public artworks since then. These outsized artworks are once again defined by increased organic entities of forms and lines, colored dots, and drips and splashes of paint.

Perello mixes his diverse approaches from previous painting styles into a more colorful, more alive, and more expressive practice than ever before. The artist is freeing himself of his famous tags once again, just to assure himself of his own legacy and to document his current artistic self-awareness to the general public. For that, he steps back into his early life in Paris, when he established his identity as John Andrew Perello – the artist. Not to lose himself in the past or to repeat its creative phase, but to resorb the power of these important years; to incorporate this particular feeling of artistic freedom in his current gigantic works of art and to let it shine even more powerfully than before.

The self-establishing reversal is also visible within Perello’s latest studio paintings, although the progress proceeds more softly. Perello enlarges and stretches the letters, so that fewer lines and repetitions are visible. It seems as if he once again zooms into the tag paintings, crawls deeper into the texturing organisms, just to visualize how these paintings in all their detail are even more alive. The countless expressive paint splashes covering the layers of the enlarged letters empower the consequent abstraction and transform the artworks into living, vibrant creatures. The material ‘paint’ marks the centerpiece of Perello’s latest period. It is about the gestural movement of the body, about the paint splashing onto the canvas, about the material itself. Perello’s artistic expression is more than ever conducted by pure emotions.