Nathalie Obadia Gallery is proud to present the first solo exhibition of Enoc Perez in Belgium.
Born in Puerto Rico (1967), Enoc Perez went to study in New York in 1986 (Pratt Institute, Hunter College). He has been working in Manhattan since 1997 where he "shoots" the fascinating skyscrapers in their utopias.
For Enoc Perez, airport terminals, museums, banks, large hotels, … all new structures, in fact, hold a promise for a better tomorrow. Modernist architecture incarnates the optimism of humanity, its desire for power and permanence, which is nonetheless tragically compromised by the perseverance of progress.
The exhibition will feature architecture "portraits":Oscar Niemeyer, Clorinda Testa, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Eero Saarinen…, but also portraits of his close relations and "still lives" through which the artist tracks beauty first and foremost and fosters buried desire.
This is what appears also in the particular technique used by Enoc Perez who has drawn inspiration for 20 years from printing methods such as silk-screen printing, like Andy Warhol, whose effects and layered superposition processes he echoes. The richly textured paintings of Enoc Perez bear physical and intense traces of this process.
Enoc Perez uses snapshots to rework his own photographs and archives showing simply reality through numerous preparatory drawings, isolating each time the different elements and colours that he likes to show. An extremely slow process of successive transfers and superimpositions on paper then ensues, followed by scraping and scrubbing to bring out an image with electrical tones and depth like an engraving.
Having reaffirmed figuration in American painting like John Currin and Elisabeth Peyton in the 1990s, Enoc Perez is now reintroducing the brush. His latest works achieve a higher degree of both abstraction and of physical intensity.