Jeff Perrone (b. 1953, Atwater, California, US) works at the intersection where West African fabric, Indian miniature colour, and Southwest Native American form flow into abstract painting. The artist combines, transposes, and joins together the materials, structures, and processes that engage the history of world culture across time and continent. Sewn buttons function as pointillist accretions that define rectilinear, curved, or gently bending, totemic bands of colour. The buttons are modern equivalents of the shells and beads used the world over in everything from everyday, functional clothing to the most sacred sculpture. The artist applies painted wood mouldings, a framing device similar to that used by the Igbo women of Nigeria, who embellish the windows, doors, and walls of their dung-and-mud houses with lumber fragments, which they recombine, in a highly stylised way, to suggest both animist and Islamist motifs. Drawing upon this communal pool of aesthetic knowledge and incorporating ‘immigrant’ and recycled materials, he creates a recombinant collage, built upon directional shifts and syncopated movements – like those of Afro-Cuban jazz or the sound-sampling mixologies of the turntablist DJs, who, as Basotho women say of their art, ‘beat out a rhythm across the wall.’
