When something is made red it’s declarative. It’s an emergency. It’s code red. It’s emphatic. It’s not wallflower red. Faded into the roses red. It’s dire. It’s determined. It’s a pronouncement. When you teach your child to play the piano you must sit beside her with a ruler at the ready. Her hand must never stoop. The palms need to be rigid. The index fingers will function like little teeth, operating metronomically. Mechanical and precise. The ruler is there to keep everything aligned. Straight. It’s like training a rose. Like when you espalier a fruit tree. If the nun is cruel, she will smack your child every time her hands droop. This is bad form. Bad posture. Like a branch that needs to be pruned. You will thank the nun privately because you won’t want to hit your child. This a form of coercion that is better to outsource. Later your child’s hand will have a red tinge. However, like a pear tree growing sideways, her mechanical teeth will ripple across the keys. Her strong fingers will caress the piano conquering Rachmaninoff and Gershwin alike. Teeth plough a field. Ripple through the field. It makes a strata. A terrain which will host. It displaces first. It is the first rhythm. The disruption that creates a terrain. Every terrain is though disposable. Contained by its parameters. It is contrapuntal. The field is where art starts. It decides the frame. Painting is constrained by these geomorphic expressions. Good painting registers this limit. They go right to the edge of the refrain, dancing, weaving the strata into new compositions. Every diagram has an outside, but it can’t go out it. How often are we told the edge is where creativity flourishes. Don’t we paint it red. Make it declarative. Announce its arrival. We’re here at the edge, “like everyone else”. Teeth rip. Nature is red in tooth and claw. Abuse is always the first relation. To use what is near. There is a pragmatism to Perkins’ painting. They’re functional. You can always follow the thread of how they’re made. They are declarative. Simple. Illusionary. And yet that process is also its subject. It’s promethean. It’s a struggle of commonplace necessity. How easily we can slip into casual refrains. Readings of banality. But what is near is also what we take. We’re contained. Within the frame. Look how the paintings teeter. Overlap each other. Where’s the frisson? The convulsion. The compulsion. Tonally they’re awash with signifiers, articulations. They thrum like Taussig’s indigo pot. It’s in the wash. In the commotion of life. So yes, these paintings are diagrammatic but they also teeter. Literally so. Hoisted by that one nail. Overlapping, precariously poised. They pose new problems of connectivity. They’re not beside themselves but overlapped. One is a discreet unit. A whole series though begins to be something else. Seriality begets connection. The frame is the field. The red ochre. How it looks dirty, immersive. Less a declarative backdrop more a passive enclosure. We have alcoves to hide in, to recover a sense of unity but also to find new articulations, new joints, new connections. So, there is a constant tension. A jostle between the discrete and the varied. That’s the geomorphic though. It’s a commotion bred of its terrain. The foxtrot isn’t one-one anymore than a waltz is one-two-three. There’s a joining up, a provisional structure at play. Time isn’t a continuum it’s right here at the tip of the arrow and yet we’re always experiencing it only in memory, in the duration of an after. After the fact, after the terrain. Teeth might rip it up, plough the field, teeter on the edge, but it’s still in the refrain, breeding new directions, new compositions. That’s time’s arrow, just as it is in the Perkins’ painting. Pragmatic, necessary, adjudicating. This is then a pedagogical structure. It wants to teach you something. Not just how to read the paintings, but how they function. They’re immersed in the frame, and yet they’re concocted from their own elsewhere. Two systems overlapping creating a third. A dimensionality we always knew existed but could never quite touch. That’s a misleading metaphor though, for it’s all contrapuntal, all contained with the field. There’s no escape, no exit, just reiterations of the geomorphic. Which is why the paintings are teeth like. Pedagogically, they rip up the field, making it ripe again. Like those “sweet honey tamarind pods” that “burst in tomorrow’s suns”. It’s all cyclical. An economy of exchange. The only real way out is irreversible, mordant, terrifyingly abyssal. That’s the lesson here. Better to recycle the motif, transform it anew. – Hamish Win