As a reaction to the fracturing that she sensed in the postwar period, Irene Rice Pereira began searching for a higher art, one that demonstrated a new understanding of man’s place, not only in the world but in the universe as well. Weaving the ideas of philosophers such as Euclid, Plotinus and Kant, the mathematician Charles Howard Hinton, and psychologist Karl Jung into her own poetry, Pereira started to lay the foundation for a progressive visual language that would go on to feature in many of her canvases.
In 1957, Pereira published The Lapis, a portfolio of writings and diagrams explaining these theories of spatial perception and representation so integral to her message. As she saw it, the need for a horizon line or a single-point perspective was gone; those tools that had served artists from primitive times through the Renaissance no longer had a place in the Space Race era. Instead, she saw space as a relationship between symbols set upon a tripartite field in which the manipulation of color, transparency, texture or placement could be used to enhance a sense of depth. In her words,
“It is a new orientation in relation to the space age. The mind perceives the object, the world, the universe and the cosmos as spatial imagery. The barriers of 2500 years of a closed-in finite universe are removed, as well as contradictions between the finite and the infinite. There is no duality. Man’s destiny in the space age is assured. The structure of the new optic demonstrates that we do not perceive solids as concrete mass but in a dematerialized form, a spatial imagery as light is deflected on contact with objects and a spatial imagery is reflected or mirrored back in successive wave formations.”
Auction Results Irene Rice Pereira
