Rice Pereira
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BENEATH the exquisite geometry of Irene Pereira's work there lies a profoundly mystical attitude towards the nature of man and his universe. Long before she became a painter this was apparent. A lonely and introspective child, she had visions of the sun as God, wrote poetry and read omniverously. After her birth at Chelsea, Massachusetts, in 1907, the family moved often, finally settling in Brooklyn in 1922. Four years later she took her first art course at Washington Irving High School and decided to become a painter. In 1927 she enrolled in evening classes at the Art Students League, where she studied until 1930. During the same period she married the commercial artist, Umberto Pereira, from whom she received a divorce in 1938. She finished her formal training with a brief period of study at the Académie Moderne in Paris on a trip abroad in 1931-32.
Pereira's first mature work was done on Cape Cod in the summer of 1932. There she painted anchors, wharfs and other ship's gear in a vigorously expressionist style, occasionally varied by flat, semi-abstract patterns. Throughout the 1930's she experimented at length with methods of obtaining various textures in paint and with techniques for painting on glass and on parchment. Much of this was done under the aegis of the WPA, both as an artist on the Federal Art Project and as a teacher in its Design Laboratory.
In 1937 Pereira began to do those strictly geometrical and rectilinear abstractions from which she has seldom deviated since. Her choice was dictated largely by her fascination with the fourth dimensional world of modern physics and mathematics, for which she has sought plastic equivalents. But her method is purely intuitive and her complex designs spring from an inner rhythm, not from calculation. Holding her rectangles and grids together by the sheer force of her instinctive feeling for dynamic relations, she often seems to suspend them, floating, in a limitless space. Light, which is for Pereira both the male principle and the humanizing element in the vastness of interstellar space, floods through nearly all her pictures, giving them brilliance and emotional warmth. It is especially radiant in the paintings done on several layers of hammered and fluted glass or on parchment stretched over a reflecting background. Only once did it threaten to disappear from her work and that was during the unhappy winter of 1950-51 spent in the gloomy city of Manchester, England, where she had gone to marry the poet George Reavey. Since their return to America light had become an increasingly important element in her work, which had also grown more romantic in other ways. Mists of color now escape at times from their bounds and undulate across the backgrounds of certain paintings. In others there is a poetic and a more specific symbolism; Spring, Twelve O'Clock is painted in the pale greens of its season, its yellow bands are sunlight, its blurred gray ones are wind. Unlike most geometrical abstractionists, Pereira has made of this highly disciplined style a very personal instrument of romantic expression.
Pereira: One's work is a mysterious process. Its conscious reality may remain a secret for a long time; maybe forever. The symbol has safely guided my course into the unknown realm of experience. The traveller is just a pilgrim. Sometimes he knows a little more, often less, because values change with each voyage. Sometimes one gets a glimpse of the bridge to eternity before it disappears like a rainbow. Somewhere between exaltation and despair lies the answer. In one sense my work gives structure and dimensions to thought in time. In another sense it is what the eye perceives when it looks inward and feels a firmament set with the jewelled constellations of the time that is man.
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