For 'Circa X', his first solo outing at Cooke Latham Gallery, Kofi Perry builds an entrancing Afrofuturist world. Combining the aesthetic principles of different ancient civilizations - an approach he describes as 'universal classicism' - the American-Iranian artist formally harmonizes multivalent symbols in his paintings and sculptures to create richly layered, open-ended stories.
Displayed on a podium at the back of the gallery is the show's lone sculpture: an imitation ancient tablet carved with a fictitious script (The Starbeam Codex, all works 2025). On the walls hang seven paintings, the surfaces of which bear faint, palm-sized grids that echo an Ancient Egyptian drawing technique used to accurately replicate bodily proportions. The figures in two of the works, The Star Son's Talent and Latter Half of the Quest, evoke the idealized youths depicted in Ancient Greece kouros statues. Perry also adopts Edgar Degas's peinture à l'essence method, thinning out oil-based paints to give the works a grainy, matte surface. This texture, and the canvases' terracotta palette, are suggestive of undiscovered relics.
Perry's characters fill the canvas, bringing to mind José Clemente Orozco's striking, monumental murals, such as La épica de la civilización americana (The Epic of American Civilization, 1932-34). Inspired by Mayan traditions, Orozco adopted an ochre palette and block-like figures - elements which are mirrored in Perry's work - to narrate the toil of Mexican labourers and Indigenous Meso-American people.
The shape of the male torso in The Star Son's Talent repeats in the geometric patterns of the tools that surround him: two cylindrical pipes and a hard-edged cuboid hammer, from which fall globular drops of sweat. In Rebirth of the Mystic, the side profile of a baby's plump body is echoed in the curves of Monstera leaves and a pair of metal shackles. In this disparate montage, there is no discernible narrative. Yet, while we can only speculate on the specific trials and triumphs of these characters, Perry depicts them as carrying themselves with grace and poise.
Perry's eclectic allusions combine the past with a speculative future, typical of Afrofuturism. In Ray Gazer's Dream of Unity, two women's faces are scarified: a traditional African beautification ritual or rite of passage. The contours of limbs in The Star Son's Talent reduce the body to essential shapes, reminding me of the early cubo-futurist, proto-constructivist works of Lyubov Popova and Kazimir Malevich. Yet, whereas early-20th-century abstraction often celebrated progress and the sheen of industrial materials, Perry's work seems more sceptical. The three metallic pipes firmly clasped by a hand in The Star Son's Chisels, for instance, do not exalt the machine; rather, they emphasize human strength.
The agile figure in Latter Half of the Quest could be an avatar from early editions of the video game Street Fighter (1987-ongoing), his blocky pose recalling a character ready for action. Beside his left hand is an ancient tablet with a halo-like, fluorescent outline that invites us to look closer. In Perry's painted world, these talismans seem to protect his characters. The zappy, graffiti-like typography spelling out 'OZIZI' in The Library's Future reminds me of that used on the album cover for Lootpack's Soundpieces (1999). In the obscured landscape depicted in The Library's Future, I can almost visualize the terrain of a different planet in the style of Sun Ra and His Arkestra's album art, such as Jazz in Silhouette (1959). Jumping across cultural reference points, Perry's dry, fuzzy brushstrokes hum a jazz or hip-hop tune. Maybe his avatars do, too.
Kofi Perry's 'Circa X' is on view at Cooke Latham Gallery, London, until 27 June
