Art and Place: Crossing Borders in the Work of Perejaume

Abstract

In a sequence of drawings from the mid-1990s, the Catalan artist Perejaume (b. 1957) visualizes the migration of art movements across geographical and political borders. In doing so, the artist offers visual forms for intangible journeys through time and space. In sharp contrast to earlier concepts of the development of art, from Vasari’s cyclical model of rise and fall to Alfred H. Barr’s linear ‘Development of Cubism and Abstract Art’, Perejaume’s drawings offer a less definitive, more suggestive, visualization of the migration of art movements. By locating his drawings in specific landscapes, the artist gives a sense of the complex spatial relations between art and place. Within his wider practice, Perejaume crosses many borders. Artist, poet, writer and performer, he works in an extensive range of styles and mediums. This paper explores Perejaume’s representations of the migration of art movements, proposing them as alternative visual and conceptual models for the shape of art history.

1. Introduction

How do artists represent the migration of ideas across time and space? What part does place play in the history of art movements? In a range of media and artistic styles the Catalan artist Perejaume (born Pere Jaume Borrell i Guinart) addresses these questions. Artist, poet, writer and performer, since the late 1970s he has employed play and humor to explore the role of the artist and the nature of image-making in media including drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, installation, performance, video, writing, poetry and mixed media works. Crossing borders both within his practice and in the themes his works address, Perejaume offers a new approach to landscape representation by examining the relationship between the studio, the gallery and the plein air. His work asks us to think again, fundamentally, about what we mean by ‘landscape’. With the same term used to refer both to natural scenery and its representation, the relationship between the two is often unclear. Perejaume’s practice interrogates this overlap. This article discusses his engagement with both forms of landscape as well as his representations of the migration of art movements, proposing that the latter may be considered productive visual and theoretical models for the shape of art history.

2. The Landscape and Its Representation

Perejaume’s output challenges categorization, and any attempt at a precise definition proves inadequate. Gloria Moure has written of how ‘Perejaume does not pursue any single direction systematically, instead following spontaneous impulses that lead to the discovery of connections among language, time and space. His means are poetic rather than analytic […]’ (Moure 1988). As a Catalan it is perhaps unsurprising that Perejaume is concerned with borders. The political borders of Catalonia have changed over the course of its history with the region under French or Spanish authority while seeking its autonomy or independence. The Catalan language, banned under Franco from official use, confirms Catalonia’s cultural distinctiveness from its neighbors. Designated in 1979 as an ‘autonomous community’, a growing independence movement led to the 2017 referendum and declaration of independence. However, the process was declared illegal by the Constitutional Court of Spain, and the leading figures either fled the country or were imprisoned. Thus, borders and identity are particularly pertinent to Catalonia’s history. The relationship between the local, the neighboring and the universal can be considered integral to the cultural unconscious of the region and are fundamental to Perejaume’s work. The artist has asserted ‘The local and the universal are, I believe, the same thing’, arguing that these concepts should not be seen as oppositional but as mutually dependent (Gambrell 1990, p. 73). He notes that Joan Miró is often seen as a ‘Parisian or generically Spanish’ artist, rather than one from Montroig (where the artist often stayed at the family home) or Palma de Mallorca (the birthplace of Miró’s mother and wife and where he frequently holidayed). The argument is exaggerated and intentionally so in order to make the point that local specificity should be celebrated rather than overlooked and that not all modernist art was produced in metropolitan centers such as Paris. Art, Perejaume states, ‘should communicate difference as difference, perpetuating singularity, interpreting untranslatable essence into comprehended rarity’ (Gambrell 1990, p. 73).

Engagement with the land and the concept of the landscape as an artistic genre underpin Perejaume’s practice. He produces creative dialogues with nature as well as with the history of landscape art, especially pleinairism. An example of this dialogue is the wittily and imaginatively titled drawing The forests of Barbizon demand that Theodore Rousseau returns them the images (1995). The image is a blur, as if by drawing and painting nature Rousseau and his Barbizon School peers somehow extracted the visual form of the forest, and it can no longer be seen (Figure 1). The title personifies the forests, suggesting that they come to life and make unexpected demands. An exhibition catalogue essay by the artist makes a tangential connection with the words of Albrecht Dürer which are quoted to support his point: ‘For indeed, art hides itself in nature, and whoever can sketch it, has captured it’ (Perejaume 1990, p. 21).

Central to Perejaume’s practice is a playful but profound study of the relationship between art and nature. Whereas the Barbizon School artists found art in nature, nature had already begun to resemble art. The term picturesque is relevant here; although originally applied to a particular kind of landscape painting, during the eighteenth century it became common usage in describing a particular kind of landscape itself which, in turn, resembled that particular kind of landscape painting. Key features found in picturesque painting were sought out and highlighted such as withered trees, rough rocks and crags, streams, waterfalls and paths. The artifice of culture was mapped onto the natural world, which was then viewed through its prism. Perejaume contemplates this relationship, transposing the way in which nature and culture are conventionally thought of and refocusing the reader’s perception onto nature as a product of art:

Perhaps landscape is the result of so much gazing. Perhaps the gazes have taken shape and have made solid what others have seen, putting in order everything we have seen, growing, now without basis, and observing us as well. Perhaps painting is the world, aged and thinned-out through use, with things its signs, as if a powerful gaze had turned the pigments into what we now see.

(Perejaume 1991, p. 50)

Perejaume seems to suggest that art has as much effect on nature, if not more, as nature has had on the history of art. In various works, he uses framing devices to highlight the ways in which we see nature through art. He has written that ‘we place a sheet of glass over the world with a frame around the edges’ (Searle 1993, p. 4). In works such as Marc al mar (Frame on the sea) (1986) the artifice of the frame is used to view nature (Figure 2). As a result, ‘everything is a painting’ (Searle 1993, p. 4). The frame becomes a fundamental part of the work as the viewer is made highly conscious of how we view the world through selective frames. In each work the frame can move, thereby changing the image.

Perejaume makes the artifice of art explicit by taking art back to nature. As Adrian Searle has commented, ‘He has taken the frame and the label out of the museum and thrown them back into the world to show their incongruity, the uneasy conventions of the truce they appear to make between language and reality’ (Searle 1993, p. 4).

The frame defines the relationship between art and that which is within it, and nature or reality, which lie outside of it. In Marc al mar, however, the extensive sea lies both within and outside of the frame, suggesting that sometimes we cannot really distinguish between the two.

3. Displacement and Condensation

Throughout his practice, Perejaume uses images and words to prompt the viewer or reader to consider things differently, from another point of view. A black and white aerial photograph, Les lletres i el dibuix (Letters and Drawing) (2004), highlights networks of roads which, from the high perspective of the image, appear to be thin threads elegantly connecting and interweaving in space (Figure 3). Employing digital techniques, a number of sections of roads and motorways have been seamlessly combined to look like delicate drawings, making artificial structures appear natural and organic. Despite the digital methods used in its production, the work alludes to handwritten language with the sweeps and curves of the lines, retaining a sense of the handmade. For Perejaume, whether a natural river or valley, or a manmade path or road, power line or railway track, lines on the land or on a map can be seen as writing messages in their own language, these lines paralleling those of human communication. The image takes plein air drawing to a new height (both literally and metaphorically) leading to what Elena Vozmediano has described as ‘the verticalization of a horizontal reality’ (Vozmediano 2005, p. 124). Viewed vertically, the artist has created an abstract artifice resembling natural forms derived from manmade lines of communication.

Perejaume extends his discussion of space to make connections between reading and walking. Both can be considered forms of movement through space and in both we seek to find our way. Although the route for the reader is shaped by the author, the reader’s response is not. A text may lead to all kinds of new paths of thought, and the reader may make connections that were not anticipated by the author. To apply a landscape analogy, the text may be dense, and the reader may need to go over the same ground a few times. By contrast, a walking route is less determined at the start. It may be shaped by the infrastructure of paths available; however, the walker can select their sequence in a way that the reader cannot. Perejaume focuses more on the similarities than the differences between reading and walking. He has written:

As both readers and walkers, we go from here to there, travelling through words, applying a jerky prose that turns and heads off down the path, and just when it is about to lose its way finds it again and continues. It is as if we looked out from the vantage point of words, from within words themselves, as if on a train, watching things pass by only half-read, bright and easily erasable.

(Perejaume 1991, p. 50)

The common feature here, for Perejaume, is words that take both readers and walkers on paths or routes that may be unexpected.

In other texts, the landscape acts as an analogy to the writing process itself. For example, when starting a new piece of writing, Perejaume argues that,

[…] we begin to create mountains with the bark kept from year to year, placing fresh plants and newly-gathered mosses there. There is a background with long and jointed phrases, among typographic plains and summits dusted with tiny writing and frosty blues.

(Perejaume 1991, p. 50)

At first, the reader has the impression that Perejaume is writing about nature, but then words are used unexpectedly, and a description of writing about a particular landscape turns into writing about writing. The illusion created by words is abruptly broken and the reader is reminded of how that illusion has been created. A piece of bark becomes a mountain, but the illusion and its materials are visible simultaneously.

Elsewhere, Perejaume applies other literary devices to visual works. Tautology is used to condense the space between nature and culture in Paint covering the ground (1995). This drawing, in turn, is reminiscent of Jorge Luis Borges’s map in his essay ‘On Exactitude in Science’, which entirely covers the territory it represents. Some of Perejaume’s drawings and paintings seem to map figuratively onto the land and become one with it. As the artist writes, ‘geography, civilized and artificial, made foundationless and mobile, is stretched out tightly across reality, covering it completely’ (Perejaume 1991, p. 46). We see the land through maps and other manmade or artificial geographical means. Paint covering the ground depicts a relief map covered with paint, thus succinctly fusing the landscape with the material of its representation in science (the map) and art (painting). Teló de muntanyes (2) (Mountain curtain 2) (2007) represents a mountainous landscape in which the distance is depicted in naturalistic details while the foreground breaks down into marks of paint, that is, the means of its representation. The image is viewed as if from behind a curtain, a small detail of which appears on its right-hand side. Perejaume engages the artifice of theatre to display both nature and its representation in art in which the two are fused together.

Mountains feature prominently in Perejaume’s work. They represent not only a key aspect of landscape art but also a challenge of nature which, he suggests, the modern and the contemporary world have physically and metaphorically overlooked. In contrast to the linearity of air travel, Perejaume’s undulating curves hug the landscape. As he has written, ‘The straight line of the modern movement has devalued orography with a levelling tourism of distances and backroads, and set the artist-subject, the work, or the tendency, far above the place’ (Perejaume 1989, p. 134). Instead, Perejaume’s feet are firmly on the ground, in the landscape, his paintbrush covering every inch of it directly. Here, painting and nature become as one.

A poem provides a good example of the artist’s method of dissolving verbal spaces too. Just as the space between nature and its representation is omitted, so too some elements that might be considered fundamental to any composition are left out thereby causing us to reconsider what we are presented with. In Grind, for example, he describes colors used to produce pigments, before turning to the possibilities of what these pigments might represent:

GRIND

• Azurite blue, malachite green
• reds and yellows of cinnabar
• vermilion, realgar, and orpiment
• minium orange, gypsum white.
• In a small mortar grind up the entire world.
(Perejaume 1999, p. 188)

Notably, the words ‘paint’ and ‘painting’ are not used. By omitting them, the poem highlights the absurdity of colored pigments representing the world. However, if we look beyond illusion to how that illusion has been created, has painting not done just this for centuries? Here, Perejaume draws on methods of displacement and condensation. Employed by surrealists, most notably in the visual arts by René Magritte, these methods make unexpected changes to the familiar, leading the viewer or reader to encounter them with greater consciousness. The words of the poem move from the micro of pigment to the macro of ‘the entire world’, missing out and thereby highlighting the spaces we inhabit.

4. Paisajismo and ‘The Impossibility of Translating Nature into Art’

In contrast to his use of condensation and displacement, Perejaume has defined the concept of paisajismo or ‘landscapism’ as ‘a response to the impossibility of translating nature into art. We try to take the outside inside in order to be able to understand what’s out there’ (Gambrell 1990, p. 68). Here, Perejaume argues that there is an ‘impossible distance between the subject and the landscape’ (Gambrell 1990, p. 70). Very occasionally art can defeat this distance: ‘Only a miraculous art is at times able to satisfy us—subjectives and subjects of the real—here among these two eminently sufficient geographies, among these two disunited but dependent territories: the world, so far away from us; and our world, wherever it might be’ (Perejaume 1991, p. 47). In his distinct writing style and use of language, Perejaume covers a point multiple times, coming at it from different directions and making all kinds of connections along the way. As Rebecca Solnit has commented succinctly with reference to Borges’s tautological map, ‘No representation is complete’ (Solnit 2017, p. 162). Thus, the land or landscape, the subject and art are explored in a myriad of ways. Perejaume emphasizes the materiality of art and of writing, using his words carefully and unexpectedly to keep the reader aware that s/he is reading ideas, and these ideas take shape but are unstable, continually moving and mutating.

For Perejaume, art, in particular paisajismo, has a vital interrelational role to play in the relationship between culture and nature. Aside from those rare occasions when we encounter ‘miraculous art’, art acts as an intermediary. He writes, art is ‘the only connection between the subject (the “I”) and nature. The painting is the nexus, the diphthong, the meeting place between the subject and nature […] The picture is a kind of nostalgic souvenir of this encounter’ (Gambrell 1990, p. 68). Although the distance between the subject and nature persists, a wide-ranging combination of diverse approaches offers a series of creative encounters.

In producing a blur rather than an illusion of nature, Perejaume asks us to reconsider the relationship between art and the natural world in The forests of Barbizon demand that Theodore Rousseau returns them the images. In contrast to the mimetic role of some landscape art, this drawing emphasizes the space or difference, the ‘impossible distance’ between man, the landscape and its artificial representation. As he wrote in ‘Two Geographies’, ‘the faithful reproduction, never completely attained, has opted for the invention of its own geography, another world made up of the substance that we speak with and look with’ (Perejaume 1991, p. 46). Here, he emphasizes the distinction between landscape and the materiality of painting or other forms of language. ‘These days’, Perejaume argues, ‘we affirm the existence of two geographies similar in both size and level of realism’ (Perejaume 1991, p. 46). Photography developed at the same time as Barbizon School painting, and he notes its central role of seeming to close the space between reality and its representation. By contrast, his own works are produced in ‘words and pigments’ and other forms that do not conceal their artifice. His paint handling, for example, is loose and textured with the paint firmly visible. The frames he uses are bold and heavy. His words take unexpected turns. Thus, Perejaume explores the relationship between art and nature in which art is differentiated from nature, ‘yet, at the same time they correspond and proliferate, independent and complete, marking out separate and distinct spheres in a divergent cartography’ (Perejaume 1991, p. 46). His words echo those above regarding the relationship between the local and the universal: in each case, difference is part of a productive dialogue between the two. By emphasizing the artifice of art, he explores its effect on how we view, consider and interact with nature. Thus, for Perejaume, art plays a vital role: ‘Capable of opening up gaps and breaches, fundamentally intermediary, art is the lapse, a no-man’s land, situated between nature and signature on the level of both geographies, constituted on top of the possibility of a real connection by its own relational ties’ (Perejaume 1991, p. 46).

5. Walking, Drawing and the Migration of Art Movements

In order to further address the ‘gaps and breaches’ between culture and nature, while at the same time highlighting their interactions and connections, Perejaume engages in walking, a performative activity that brings him into direct physical contact with the land. As Vozmediano has commented, ‘The geography walked is something very different from the geography traveled by car at high speed’ (Vozmediano 2005, p. 124). While his practice can be explored alongside Francis Alys’s walks that largely take place in urban spaces or the walks of land artists such as Richard Long and Hamish Fulton, it is also distinctly different and, like his other activities, highly varied. Perejaume’s practices can also be related to the dérives and détournements of Guy Debord and the Lettrist International (later the Situationist International) and other psychogeographers. Although Perejaume’s walks take place in nature, not in the city, the dérive creates the frame in which new and unexpected discoveries can be made, while ‘détournement creates new and unexpected meanings by hijacking and disrupting the original’ (Coverley 2010, p. 95).

Connections can be made too with ideas expressed in the writing of Solnit and others in their appreciation of getting lost or, at least, of not planning ahead too proscriptively. As Jeffrey Swartz, who has translated many of Perejaume’s writings, has commented,

Following Perejaume about on his early morning rounds, in the half-light of daybreak, we see how he is constantly picking a path then losing it then finding it again; one moment his bearing is sure, the next he is slipping wildly about, his fingers frantically clawing at the air while pigments and pencil lead go flying.

(Swartz 1991, p. 43)

This practice seems to describe human thought too. Sometimes we follow a thought clearly, but at other times we are unsure, searching for the best direction to take. Like Perejaume, we also seek the best form for that thought, whether in pen, pencil or pigment. Uncertainty is central to his practice and his philosophy. As he writes, ‘We remain with uncertainty, and whoever claims to understand is perhaps only making things up’ (Perejaume 1991, p. 48).

This uncertainty is not only more honest but also far more productive than certainty, enabling us to ‘put the unresolved elements in contact, even if in precarious fashion’ (Perejaume 1991, p. 48). Uncertainty opens up possibilities as Perejaume’s writing takes us on a journey of unknowns. When we start reading one of his sentences, we are often uncertain as to what we might pass along the way and where we might end up. There are always surprises, and this is not only due to reading his words in translation. The destination is often unclear, while the journey itself is rich and stimulating. For example, he writes the following, with reference to the way that figuration brings together art and nature:

Whoever takes pencil and paper and sets out on foot comes to discover this, travelling by way of texts and clearings, through inscribed fields, lines of paint and picturesque villages, taking simultaneous pleasure in nature and naturalism, reality and irrealism, the slope rising in subsequent planes slashed with long strokes of color listening in amazement to the bright chirping of things and pigments in what is neither completely site nor completely paint, with airs of idiomatic sayings haunting breathless places, there seeing the very convention of landscape painting in the collision of margins full of writing and a bunch of flowers, that mix of earth and paint that we call landscape: great abysses blinded by paint, bronze and light.

(Perejaume 1991, pp. 49–50)

Reading this, I have the impression of traveling through landscapes, words and paintings, going from walking and observing landscapes to entering into the forms of their representation. Through Perejaume’s words, reality and its representation are difficult to differentiate. The land and its image become one. Words, sounds, ideas, reality and nature are all intimately interconnected as the real, the artificial and the means of creating both fuse together. In this way, Perejaume’s writing breaks down binary structures such as art or artifice and reality. Each loses its distinction as forms and the materials that compose those forms are joined together in a range of possibilities.

Thus, Perejaume’s practice ties his work to the land art and conceptual art of the 1960s and 1970s, while the artist, most notably in the titles of his works and in his writings, locates it in relation to that of the plein air tradition of the nineteenth century. The results, while relating to all of these movements, are distinctly different from them in many ways. With his profoundly cross-disciplinary, mixed-media method, Perejaume brings a late Romantic poetic approach to the contemporary period, drawing attention to the ways in which culture alters our perception of nature. Surrealist displacement and condensation lead us to rethink what we are looking at or reading, as well as how it has been constructed. Rather than suggest in postmodern terms that only the representation is real, Perejaume emphasizes how artificial structures affect the ways in which we see and conceive of the natural world.

The absurdity of some of Perejaume’s practices—such as the idea of carrying paintings across mountains—and the distinctive ways in which he articulates his ideas in words and images have a playful quality too but with equally serious intent. As Karen O’Rourke has commented, the Lettrists described psychogeography as ‘“a science of relations and ambiances” they were developing “to give play in the society of others [le jeu de société; literally, “the parlor game”] its true meaning: a society founded upon play. Nothing is more serious. Amusement is the royal privilege that must be made available to everyone”’ (O’Rourke 2021).

Perejaume’s walking practice thus explores both the depiction and experience of nature. In 1984, he walked to the mountains carrying on his shoulder a postcard display stand of the kind that might be found in a gallery or souvenir shop. At various points on his journey, he stopped and filled the stand not with postcards but with mirrors. The resulting photographic documentation of the work record a range of changing reflections on the mirrors of the surrounding landscape according to where the stand was placed. In Postaler (1984), the reflection of nature is a literal one. When displayed in an exhibition, the artifice of the gallery space is highlighted: six photographs are displayed alongside the stand filled with mirrors that now reflect the gallery interior and its visitors.

Perejaume’s walking practice also finds its material form in a series of drawings from the mid-1990s, in which the medium of drawing is used by the artist to depict the usually mountainous landscape and to seek a visual form to depict the intangible migration of art movements through time and space. Lines following the relief of mountains map The intrinsically graphic activity of the way in which styles are displaced through the territory (1995). Equally suggestive in both title and form are Cubism crossing the Boldís Flats (1995) and Different incursions of Dadaism in Sant Celoni (1995). In each drawing, small arrows are located in the relief landscape suggesting tangible, traceable, routes (Figure 4). The locations are from Perejaume’s native region of Catalonia, thereby depicting these art movements firmly in his local territory.

In other drawings the artist imagines the migration of art movements across geographical and political borders in terms of literally carrying paintings by artists including Ferdinand Hodler, Joan Miró and Francis Picabia up and down mountains or from one city to another, journeys planned in diagrammatic drawings to map his route along and across the topography of the land (Figure 5).

The choice of artists is not by chance. From a low-income family, Hodler is recorded as having journeyed on foot from Bern to Geneva, while, during his life, Miró moved between Montroig, Barcelona, Paris and Palma de Mallorca. Perhaps most noteworthy is the choice of Picabia, who traveled to New York City several times in the early twentieth century and is considered a significant figure, alongside Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, in introducing the work of European modernists to artists and collectors in the United States. Of course, many other artists traveled extensively at this time too, taking artistic ideas and tangible works with them. Perejaume selects just a few examples. The choice of location is not by chance but firmly based on areas familiar to Perejaume. Regional specificity pervades the drawings in the artist’s defense of the local. As in the paintings of mountains discussed above, Perejaume seems to scrutinize every detail of the landscape in these drawings and in related writings. Every centimeter has value and is worth representing.

The Route des Peintres (1996) is a more complex web of jumbled lines, incoherent and irrational. In sharp contrast to earlier concepts of the development of art, from Vasari’s cyclical model of rise and fall to modern diagrams of the history of art movements, such as Alfred H. Barr’s cover to Development of Cubism and Abstract Art (1936), Perejaume’s drawing offers a less precise, more suggestive, visualization of the migration of art movements through space as well as time. Intentionally lacking logic and precision, it indicates how art develops in messy ways in relation to physical geography. The term ‘route’ in the title of the drawing can refer both to the development of an artist’s ideas and of their career, both of which are often messy and unpredictable. As in a walk, the route may change along the way. Similarly to Hank Willis Thomas’s reimagining of Barr’s diagram as Colonialism and Abstract Art (2019), Perejaume’s drawings also demonstrate the interactions taking place at any one time between various artists and movements. Instead of simplifying art history into a narrative of linear influences, Perejaume draws attention to the complex relationships between artists and artistic ideas taking place at any one time.

6. Spatial Relationships

Perejaume’s orographic drawings, then, open up new ways of looking at and thinking about the land as he draws attention to the spatial relations between things. While this concern finds visual form in Perejaume’s work, it has also been discussed in other fields. In Of Other Spaces (a text published in 1984 based on a 1967 lecture), Michel Foucault identified the twentieth century as ‘the epoch of space’. As he explained,

We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed. We are at a moment, I believe, when our experience of the world is less that of a long life developing through time than that of a network that connects points and intersects with its own skein.

(Foucault 1984, p. 22)

Foucault’s notion of a network finds a comparable thesis in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s equally landmark text ‘Rhizome’, the introduction to A Thousand Plateaus (1976). A rhizome is a biological term meaning an open and democratic system in which ‘any point […] can be connected to anything other, and must be’ (Deleuze and Guattari [1976] 1985, p. 7). The rhizome is ‘acentered’ and ‘nonhierarchical’, developing in all directions endlessly (Deleuze and Guattari [1976] 1985, p. 21; Schultz 2001).

Whereas Foucault perceived ‘a network that connects points and intersects with its own skein’, Deleuze and Guattari focus more fully on the connecting lines: ‘There are no points or positions in a rhizome, as one finds in a structure, tree or root. There are only lines’ (Deleuze and Guattari [1976] 1985, p. 8). This focus is repeated throughout the text many times, and the different qualities of the lines are described in geographical terms: ‘lines of articulation or segmentarity, strata and territories; but also lines of flight, movements of deterritorialization and destratification’ (Deleuze and Guattari [1976] 1985, p. 3). Deleuze and Guattari emphasize the importance of the middle of these lines, the in between, as ‘A rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo’, for this is ‘where things take on speed’ (Deleuze and Guattari [1976] 1985, p. 25). The rhizome as a system of thought contrasts with the conventional metaphor of a tree structure: ‘The tree imposes the verb “to be”, but the fabric of the rhizome is the conjunction, “and... and... and...”’ (Deleuze and Guattari [1976] 1985, p. 25). It is thus the relationships that form and define a system rather than the points that the relationships connect.

The lines of the rhizome, then, exemplify multiplicity as ideas develop freely and all kinds of connections can be made. As Deleuze and Guattari explain, ‘The rhizome is altogether different, a map and not a tracing. […] What distinguishes the map from the tracing is that it is entirely oriented toward an experimentation in contact with the real’ (Deleuze and Guattari [1976] 1985, p. 25). A map is not as fully dependent on something else as a tracing is. These writings relate well to Perejaume’s practice, and some of his drawings can be considered akin to both maps and tracings. The notion of the rhizome finds particular resonance in his works, which foreground the ‘in between’ connections that interlink all kinds of things. His drawing of the Route des peintres, for example, provides a visual rhizomatic form for the ways in which an artist’s work and career develop in various directions. Artists, practices and theories move across borders simultaneously, making varied and unpredictable connections. The history of art does not develop in neat straight lines either but is similarly unpredictable and messy.

7. Conclusions

Perejaume’s practice makes new connections and, equally, addresses the ‘impossible distance’ between nature and representation, not only acknowledging but mining the space between the two. In varied and creative forms, he explores the ways in which the land is seen through artificial structures. The land or landscape can be equated here with reality more broadly as the artist explores the effects of art, language and other framing devices on how we see and conceive of the world around us. This exploration is acted out literally in works such as in Marc al mar but also metaphorically in, for example, The forests of Barbizon demand that Theodore Rousseau returns them the images. His means are messy, confusing and unexpected, taking the reader and viewer on unpredictable journeys through words, images and spaces. In depicting the migration of art movements across geographical and political borders, he asks us to rethink the borders that we have written into the history of art. In Perejaume’s drawings, art movements form independent connections, rather than divisions, across time and space. He highlights how the history of art history takes place not only in metropolitan centers but equally in tiny mountainous villages.