NYAB Event - Enoc Perez Exhibition

Enoc Perez Exhibition

Acquavella Galleries

This event has ended.

For the past twenty years, Perez worked exclusively in a technique that mimics the process of color printing, inspired in part by the influence of Andy Warhol and his silkscreens. Just this year, Perez began working with the paintbrush, experimenting with a new method alongside his innovative printmaking technique. These exciting paintings are being shown for the first time in this exhibition.

Perez, who has lived in midtown Manhattan since 1997, is captivated by the iconic buildings of New York’s skyline, painting series of buildings such as the Lever House and the Seagram Building in varied palettes and sizes. He is best known for his sleek depictions of these modernist buildings, rendered in eye-catching, resplendent hues. In addition to the New York monuments, Perez also frequently paints modernist buildings that he remembers from his youth in Puerto Rico.

Perez is drawn to such architectural landmarks because he admires the utopian ambitions and optimism that inspired their construction. As he explains, “The architecture that I choose, I choose because it is form that embodies meaning and metaphor. For me, ideas of optimism and possibility are important ideas and I like for these ideas to be present in my paintings.” In addition to his architectural subjects, he has painted vivid series of sensuous nudes, still lifes, and tropical resorts, many of which include veiled biographical references to Perez’s Puerto Rican heritage.

Though he continues to be inspired by the same subjects, Perez’s experimentation with the paintbrush represents a dramatic new direction for the artist. “Taking up the brush again has been really great, it is allowing me to expand the aesthetic choices that my paintings embody and it has made color into a vehicle to achieve a greater degree of abstraction and intensity. I always love the abstraction that lives within the architecture, and I am making that abstraction most important through the use of color,” Perez explains. In Biblioteca Jose M. Lazaro, UPR, PR – a portrait of the library at the University of Puerto Rico, where both of his parents taught – Perez flooded the painting with a radiant palette of electric reds to animate the composition and exploit the inherent geometric abstraction of the building. Monochrome colors dominate many of the paintings, ranging from these intense shades of red to shimmering silvers, neon yellows, deep blues, and inky blacks.

Enoc Perez was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico in 1967. He moved to New York in 1986 to study painting at the Pratt Institute and earned his master’s degree at Hunter College in 1992. He lives and works in New York City. Acquavella Galleries is his exclusive international agent.