A tube station hardly seems like a site for an encounter with the transcendental but Jem Perucchini’s luminous mural at the Brixton underground glows through the gloom of rainy London weather in a decidedly ethereal manner.

Commissioned by Art On The Underground, Rebirth of the Nation is imbued with a golden light: against the rays of an orange sun, we see two black women flanked by two men holding spears, wearing resplendent gowns, looking akin to icons made of saints in Orthodox churches.

Jem Perucchini was born in 1995 and graduated in 2021 from the Accademia di Brera in Milan. His influences span centuries of art history and transcend geographical regions. He explains to STIR how his work has been informed by his upbringing, “I was born in Ethiopia, a country extraordinarily rich in history and always linked to the West. I grew up and was educated in Italy, a country of immense significance in art history. These two aspects of my life converge in my work.”

These cultural influences can be seen in Rebirth of the Nation, along with an emphasis on the relationship between written histories and image-making.

Growing up in Italy, Perucchini was preoccupied with drawing—which he saw as a “necessity or a fundamental practice”—and visiting cultural sites such as the Uffizi and Vatican Museums. He credits these visits as the impetus behind his desire to become a painter, attesting to his visual lexicon that draws heavily from the canon of the early Renaissance.

Perucchini states, “The influence of the early Renaissance is significant; the purity of forms, composition, and symbolism are all factors that have consistently struck me and influenced my work.”

Perucchini’s interest in engaging with history and visual tropes transcends the early Renaissance. As evidenced in his works, both through the visual references they build, as well as through the unearthing of lesser-known historical narratives that he sheds light on through his paintings.

Take the mural at Brixton station—it is inspired by the ‘Ivory Bangle Lady’, the name given to the remains of a North African woman found in a fourth-century grave in York. The lady was buried with rare, precious objects—including the ivory bangle she was named after—indicating her high status in the Roman society that inhabited Britain at the time.

Jessica Vaughan, the Art on the Underground curator who worked with Perucchini on the commission, describes the two central women in Rebirth of the Nation as a mirror image of the past and the future. “The discovery of the Ivory Bangle Lady supported the theory that Roman society in Britain was much more ethnically diverse than mainstream history teaches us. Jem wanted to celebrate her, and point towards her as a way of saying that black Britain has a far longer legacy than we are taught in school,” she says.

Vaughan adds that often when we speak about places such as Brixton, we tend to imagine Windrush as the first real influx of immigrants into the UK.

“And so, I think Jem referencing a black figure in history who dates back to the fourth century is celebratory and he’s done it in a visual form that reinterprets a history painting. It is elevating her, by recording her in the form of a painting—much like those of prominent white men that we know so well from the art historical canon because their legacies live on through these paintings.”

 The painting isn’t simply a dialogue of the Ivory Bangle Lady but also forms a conversation with symbols, allegorical references, and styles from various moments in art history. The purple orb held by one of the women, which was historically a symbol of sovereign power in painting iconography, and the otherworldly nimbus behind the figures make the work seem like a contemporary re-imagining of a Renaissance altarpiece.

The dappled quality of the painting, where light specks of tinted colour are overlaid on a darker base, is reminiscent of Porphyry, a purple stone speckled with white which was regarded to have special associations with Roman emperors. The clothing worn by the figures evokes batik and African wax cloth which are materials strongly linked with African diaspora. For Perucchini, “Brixton represents a microcosm of London, a place where the community creates a local focus. The Underground station then acts as the main pivot between the centre and the periphery, the inside and the outside of the city.”

By bringing a peripheral moment in history to a prominent public location, Perucchini plays with the idea of art as a historical record and questions what is worthy of being remembered and represented. This preoccupation with history permeates his older work as well. His solo exhibition at Corvi-Mora in 2022, was at once familiar—some works carried the ghostly influences of works by early Renaissance painters such as Masaccio—but also immediate and distinct. What makes them discernibly contrasting from their Renaissance predecessors is the particular manner in which Perucchini builds up the textures on his linen canvases. He has devised a technique using oil paint then sprayed onto the canvas which allows him to create the "dappled" effect that has become his signature. The layering of colours, as a result, conjures a feeling of luminosity.

It is Perucchini’s play between contemporaneity and historicity that makes his oeuvre so compelling. On one hand, the quiet elegance his figures exhibit in their long-limbed gestures—particularly in Partita Di Scacchi— is reminiscent of Caravaggio, or even of the many treatises such as Cicero’s De Oratore, which laid out formal hand gestures for imploring, for persuading, for supplication and more. Similarly, in the sculptural work Senza titolo (Giovane), the glazed black visage of a young African man has his hands poised in an oratory gesture, wearing garments that seem almost liturgical.

On the other hand, the fresh visual shock of seeing the darkness of his African figures contrasted against the luminary light of haloes, not only serves as a gentle reminder of the artist’s heritage but also unsettles the archetypes embodied in canonical art history as purely Western. He plays with the forms and compositions of what appear to be canonical references, by clothing them in African wax cloth and marrying African references to Western ones, he creates a unique visual language.

Talking about the convergence of these visual legacies, Peruchini states that he has always been interested in the recurrence of patterns and iconographic tropes across different cultures. He is particularly intrigued by the resemblance of wax textiles to certain patterns in early Renaissance paintings. The idea of an iconographic vocabulary shared across cultures and civilisations is a recurring element in his work, one that not only bridges the two cultures he belongs to but also unsettles the ideas of a centre and periphery, in the same way, his depiction of a fourth-century black noblewoman in a modern-day altarpiece at Brixton Station does. 

In the note accompanying his show at Corvi-Mora, Perucchini writes: “For centuries, painting has fixed scenes by representing them… an instrument for the technical reproduction of reality, painting has had an active role in the construction of historical fictions long before the advent of photography…the hierarchy of narratives for centuries has meant that generations of artists have engaged with the representation of the same stories. However, artists have also always retained an awareness that history can always be seen and interpreted from multiple viewpoints.”

Perucchini’s skill is in his elision of perspectives; Christian iconography, painting techniques that reference everything from pointillism to sfumato-like hazes, altarpiece-like compositions, and his nod towards African textile traditions. He creates a continuous dialogue with the past and the present that is still being written—this time from the multi-referential viewpoint of a visionary young artist who is breathing fresh life into what we thought we already knew.