Peri’s grandfather was a well-known Constructivist artist and is a primary influence in his work. “I’m very interested in the roots of early Modernism, Suprematism, Dada/Constructivism,” Peri explains. “All the elements which were used to fill the gap left by the absence of the figure, e.g. the allusion to tradition as validation in compositional rigor, political commitment, the pseudo science of people like Pyotr Ouspensky concerned with higher knowledge, the 4th dimension etc.; and in the anxiety involved in that, the excess of stuff that gets poured into the sparseness of geometric abstraction. There’s something psychologically painful about looking at all that effort towards human advancement that was lumbered onto abstraction from where we are today. The pattern of the balls in this painting reminded me of Velasquez portraits of the Infanta. I liked the idea of them as desolate units forming into an absurd representation of a figure.”