NYAB Event - Enoc Perez “One World Trade Center”

Enoc Perez “One World Trade Center”

Peter Blum Gallery

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Peter Blum announces an exhibition of new paintings by Enoc Perez entitled One World Trade Center. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery.

In his newest series titled One World Trade Center , Enoc Perez explores the charged meaning of the recently completed “Freedom Tower”, an architectural icon and stand in for one of America’s darkest moments. Painted on large canvases, Perez’s architectural investigation plays out in a shimmer of varied hues and saturations. The painting’s gilded silver backgrounds distort and collapse as their emphatically painted surfaces attempt to find a decisive register. It is this slippage and shift , as the paintings attempt to align , that reflects the artist’s struggle to dissect and confront what it means to paint such a fraught architectural portrait.

Perez’s unique and obsessive process pits the mechanical against the hand made. Each painting is created in a flurry of painted layers. These layers are applied through a transfer method developed over many years in which the artist applies paint on paper and then uses the opposing side to press the paint onto the canvas with a pencil or at times his own hand. The physicality of the painting process is evident throughout as each image of the “Freedom Tower” is individually worked and layered atop the next consumed in a field of reflective silver paint. It is in the action of his painting that Perez contributes to the discourse which artists such as Andy Warhol and Christopher Wool have through the use of printmaking methods .