Not an artist given to great subtlety, Mauro Perucchetti’s new show at Beaux Arts* is a big punchy thrill. For a start, as you walk up Cork Street, three four foot-tall jelly babies look out at you from inside the gallery, bulbous, translucent and benign. There are more jelly babies inside, normal-sized jelly babies lined up in rows in a “clone factory” or jumbled and trapped inside a large, transparent urethane crucifix.
As I say, not terribly subtle. Neither’s the crucifix which contains condoms (still wrapped) of many brands, all colourful like naughty confetti.
At the same time, for all the big bright visual unsubtlety, it’s not precisely clear what he’s trying to get with his wee multicouloured jelly baby army. I tend to be wary of artists going on about clones: I’ll worry that they were sneering at ordinary people. But these are JELLY BABIES! What’s not to like? They seem so pretty and so pleasant that it’s hard to see this show as snobbish badness. They’ll surely taste great if you put them in your mouth. And in my favourite piece there, “Notre Dame”, hundreds of jelly babies are marshalled in strict formation and back-lit for a glorious rose window effect.
So I’ll take this show as being about the mistakes you make when you don’t look carefully, when you treat people like clones and when you refuse to see the complicated beauty in front of your face. And I’ll be happy.
(*NB the text and images for this show aren’t up on the site as I write, hopefully they will be soon.)