Perejaume 

(Sant Pol, Barcelona, 1957)

 Artist and writer, formed by the classes in art history and philosophy he attended at the Universitat de Barcelona and by Verdaguer, Foix, Jujol, Miró and Brossa, by Catalan popular culture and the rural world, he began exhibiting as a painter in the mid seventies. The painting was soon coexisting with texts, performances and videos, tracing a trajectory that redefines plein-airism and landscape with distinctive modes of saying and making, such as pessebrism (Catalan pessebrisme)*, dis-painting, oism** and, more recently, the ‘manoeuvre’, which led him to curate Nocturndiürn (Palau Foundation, 2013) and Maniobra, in parallel with the publication Mareperlers i ovaladors (MNAC, 2014). Perejaume thus achieves the maximum expression of an ecological gesture that erases the distinctions between authorship and audience, between nature and culture, and is present in all of his exhibitions, from Postaler (Sala Montcada, 1985) and Deixar de fer una exposició (MACBA, 2009). He has published books of essays such as Ludwig Jujol (Magrana, 1989), Oïsme (Proa, 1998), L’obra i la por (Galaxia Gutenberg, 2007), and of poetry, such as Obreda (Empúries, 2003) and Pagèsiques (Edicions 62, 2011). He has received the Premi Nacional d’Arts Visuals (Department of Culture of the Generalitat de Catalunya, 2005) and the Premio de Artes Plásticas (Spanish Ministry of Culture, 2006), among others.

Joana Hurtado Matheu

* The English equivalent was proposed by art critic and translator Jeffrey Swartz. The pessebre is a traditional Nativity scene, which may include ‘additional, often lightly irreverent representations of rural life and customs’ (Swartz).

** Jeffrey Swartz’s translation of oïsme, a neologism of Perejaume’s from the Catalan verb oir, ‘to hear’.