Our colleague József Péri belonged to the “old school” of goldsmiths, in the best sense of the term: a master craftsman who respected tradition and never felt the need to continually redefine the boundaries of his craft in pursuit of fashionable trends, merely to justify the use and value of traditional goldsmithing tools, materials and forms of expression to those who persistently questioned their relevance to contemporary art.
His works, distinguished by their meticulous design and craftsmanship, included both large-scale metalworks displayed in public spaces (the Agrobank sign in Pécs, 1991; the finely chased copper reliefs at the Slovak Secondary School in Budapest, 1992; the bronze coat of arms of the village of Soly, 1994) and smaller, more intimate objects intended to be held or worn (liturgical objects, a monstrance and a rosary for Pope John Paul II, 1991; jewellery and medals).
Of the metalworking techniques he regularly employed, the combination of amorphous metal shaped by melting with rigid, sharply defined sheets and wires was the most distinctive and characteristic feature of his artistic expression. As a jewellery maker, he combined silver with a melted surface, stones set in sheet-metal bezels and chains within a single piece, emphasising the contrasts between them. This complex use of materials and forms of expression found its most striking manifestation in his small sculptures depicting beetles and other insects, which may be regarded as his most personal and individual creations. The unity of the natural model and the unforced use of stone and metal to represent it reminds modern humanity, lost in the details of our contradictory age, of the fundamental unity of existence.
He was an expert in heraldry, a field that has by now become something of a no-man's-land. He applied his extensive knowledge not only in his design work (including the coat of arms of Budapest's Second District), but also as a tireless correspondent, drawing the attention of decision-making bodies to errors arising from their inadequate understanding of heraldic principles. At the expense of time that might otherwise have been devoted to his own creative work, he served almost continuously in professional organisations, representing the interests of our particular field, goldsmithing and metalwork, as well as those of artists and visual culture more broadly. He was a member of the board and executive committee of the National Association of Hungarian Creative Artists, affiliated with the Hungarian Public Foundation for Creative Arts, a member of the board of the Association of Hungarian Fine and Applied Artists, and a member of the leadership of the Association's Goldsmiths' Section.
In the early 1990s, at the invitation of the Crown Committee, we had the opportunity on several occasions to examine the Holy Crown of Hungary from the perspectives of its manufacturing techniques and the history of its creation. Our complementary expertise enabled us to carry out this work successfully, and the study resulting from our investigations may contribute significantly to clarifying the questions surrounding the origins of the Crown, which unfortunately remain unresolved to this day.
József Péri, a goldsmith and metal artist with a classical education, who admired Persian art and Rossini's music and regarded the iconographic precision and interpretability of medieval art as models to emulate, was a recipient of the Mihály Munkácsy Award, a member of the Hungarian Academy of Arts, and a holder of the Commander's Cross of the Order of the Red Lion and the Officer's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Hungary. Through decades of creative work and consistently outstanding professional achievements, he secured his rightful place in the history of modern Hungarian goldsmithing. He was just seventy when his career drew to a close.
(In Magyar Iparművészet (Hungarian Applied Art), 2003/2, pp. 77–78.)