Practice stillness

Kahli Perkins’ soft abstractions ebb and flow. Viewed at a distance, it's possible to articulate their shades—greys, browns, blues, purples, pinks and yellows—but on moving closer they become curiously less clear. Their subtle striations of colour evade straightforward perception. As your eyes dance across their surfaces, forms appear alluring and illusive.

Notice how their shades bleed. Watch as concentrations of pigment appear and dissolve. And stumble through the strange impossibility of naming what you see. In their presence, language and knowledge fail, delightfully. It’s as though the artist permits us to detour from the most familiar routes in our brain. She asks us to navigate these works in other ways, both familiar and new, where seeing is feeling.

Stepping into this other way of experiencing art, these paintings reward slowness. Each work captures and conjures small pleasures and quiet joys. Of lying in bed with a loved one. Of turning your face to the sun. Of hearing your cat’s purr and your dog’s muffled snoring. Of smelling fresh, seaside air. Warmth. Sunshine. Contentment. Sleeping. Stillness. The sea and the earth. Perkins interrupts the frenetic pace of contemporary life and asks us to linger here.

These leisurely moments also mimic the artist’s own protracted process. In the studio, she carefully builds up thin layers of paint, deftly manoeuvring between detailed colour-study plans and in-the-moment decisions. Some works are louder and more active. Others harness the slightest subtleties of watercolour-greys to explore the limits of nuance and distinction. In her finished abstractions, traces of the artist appear mille-feuillesque: almost imperceptible, yet undeniably present.

Tuning into the quiet rhythms of Perkins’ paintings, they spill their secrets. Borrowing from international interdisciplinary artist, Evan Ifekoya, they hum with the profound and surprising reminder to: “Practice stillness // as a matter of urgency.” Perkins' paintings also remind me of the wisdom of monochromal artist, Robert Ryman, who once shared: “The real purpose of painting is to give pleasure.” In this decelerated corner of the universe, stillness and pleasure reside.

~~~~~

Text by Louise R Mayhew for the exhibition A matter of urgency, Aster+Asha Gallery, 2022.