Skarstedt is pleased to present Enoc Perez: Recent Drawings, the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, on view at Skarstedt East Hampton.
Engaging with a variety of subject matter, Perez sources found imagery – art history, social media, celebrity snapshots, cinema, car culture, and his native Puerto Rico – appropriating the familiar. With a practice rooted in the liminal space between printmaking and painting, Perez favors oil transference by means of paint-loaded paper over brushes, imitating the four-color printing process by building colorfully complex layers to compose his painted subjects. Though powerfully linear, Perez’s drawings are similarly layered with color and content, compounding portraits, landscapes, text and objects.
A Warholian embrace of both fine art and popular culture illustrates Perez’s conceptual subtleties. Doubly voyeuristic, Untitled (Lindsay Lohan) displaces the circa 2009 paparazzi shot of the actress, reinterpreting the image from its original context to underscore relationships between maker and imitator. Much like Val Kilmer’s Jim Morrison in the 1991 biopic – the actor and singer shown together in Untitled (Val) – Perez initiates a dialogue on artistic hierarchy and creative genius, celebrating a Manet with the same esteem as a Dodge Charger.
With references ranging in contemporaneity, Perez’s drawings are derived from our cultural lexicon, offering a window into the artist’s glossary of visual and thematic influences. Perez identifies the fine line between accessibility and obscurity, acting as both creator and audience as if to reverse the effects of our oversaturated media consumption. Perez’s drawings scroll through these notions – no doubt with a sprinkle of apocalyptic dread.
About Enoc Perez
Enoc Perez was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico in 1967. Moving to New York in 1986, Perez earned his M.F.A at Hunter College in 1992, following his B.F.A. at the Pratt Institute. With a loose, abstract style, Perez often looks to the Modernist architecture of midtown Manhattan for inspiration, drawn not only to their historical impact, but also their parity with power and permanence. These notions extend to his paintings and drawings of artist studios, domestic interiors, celebrity culture, and collage.
Enoc Perez has exhibited extensively throughout the United States and abroad, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Corcoran Art Gallery, Washington D.C.; Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Juan; Centre Pompidou, Paris; and the British Museum, London.
