“A Slab Block is a type of housing estate block, like Corbusier’s L’Unité,” Peri says. “I wanted the implied monumentality of the title to apply to a fairly modest size painting. I grew up on an estate with lots of these blocks and I liked that this painting might be a messy ill-constructed attempt at making a structure that stands up and contains itself. I want the work to always show its construction: the thickness of surfaces built up, the ghosted lines of marks visible underneath the surface. I don’t want the paintings to be clean and flat in order to assert their contemporaneity, rather that they show a problematic depth and broken surface, which seems to me more appropriate for the history of abstraction. There’s a Markus Lupertz quote I really like, that “abstraction is like the apple of knowledge – once it’s been tasted there’s no going back”, which I take to mean that now one has to circle around it somehow.”