Blinky Palermo: permutations

photo courtesy of dia beacon

Excerpted from an essay by Anne Rorimer
Palermo’s decision to use the same three hues throughout the work as a whole gave him the foundation for a set of combinations with which to set forth a controlled permutational color scheme. The scheme, however, evinces no regularized, inflexible system. Even while it takes full advantage of the visual power of repetition, it spares itself of an unyielding, mathematically determined seriality.

Free from representational obligation within a single rectangular unit, the colors of red, yellow, and black carry the eye from panel to panel and around the room without enforcing a sequence. Although Palermo refuses to impose a definite system of color arrangement, viewers may tend to want to look for one, a desire that encourages them not to dwell on any one panel. Instead they participate in the experience of observing unenclosed, resonating hues that ”float and breathe in the space of the gallery,” Having escaped referential responsibility and subjugation to the strictures of formal delineation.

The compositional relationships among the colors foster a sense of the color as disembodied from the unframed aluminum panels, which are almost imperceptible, projecting only minimally from the wall by hidden fasteners. These chromatic relationships are marked by their inherent potential for an open-ended interplay between individual panels and sets of panels.