Born in Tekeze, Ethiopia, and raised in Italy, Jem Perucchini draws on an unusually expansive visual background: Italian Renaissance painting, Ethiopian Orthodox church frescoes, African wax-print textiles, and the mythology of ancient Greece. He absorbs these influences into a visual language in which historical periods and cultural traditions coexist. Many of his compositions are dominated by a single saturated tone—emerald, aubergine, crimson. His mottled surfaces are equally distinctive, an effect he creates by spraying an oil-based emulsion onto each canvas. In “Sospiro,” Perucchini contemplates solitude. Sospiro, Italian for “sign,” becomes a metaphor for passage between the inner self and the external world—a moment when something deeply private briefly takes physical form before disappearing again. —Clara Scholl