Enoc Pérez

Galerie Enrico Navarra and Galerie 75 Faubourg are pleased to present their first collaboration with American artist Enoc Pérez. The exhibition includes a selection of recent paintings and drawings, the majority of which are exhibited for the first time, addressing the artist’s favorite themes: interiors, portraits of famous people, and cars, among others.

At the end of the 90s, Enoc Pe?rez made a series of portraits of women he secretly admired. In the early 2000s, his meeting with Carole, who would become his wife, immediately impacted the subjects of his works: he began his exploration of architectural forms, one of the major and most recognizable themes of his work. Around 2018, on the recommendation of his mentor Peter Brant, Pe?rez began to explore the interiors. His paintings of buildings and interiors are like cultural portraits frozen in a time, in a place, evoking the past, the present and the future, deliberately devoid of any human presence. While the architectures are created as a tribute, the interiors are more of an ode. Each chosen room is directly linked to a person Pe?rez admires or finds intriguing: artists, musicians, celebrities. During the lockdown, he diversifies his subjects: cars in flames, airplanes, and a return to architectural imagery.

For the first time in almost ten years, the artist is also revisiting his methodology for sketches. Using oil painting since the beginning of his career, Enoc Pérez stands out for his unique and unprecedented technique. Inspired by the printmaking process, he transfers paint from a sheet of paper to canvas by rubbing and scraping. The paint is thus pressed into the canvas through the paper.

Pérez is constantly experimenting, absorbing, processing, and reorienting himself, he keeps evolving and perfecting his technique. Thus, after having explored painting imitating screenprinting, his technique tends towards a painting process imitating photography. Fascinated by the effects created by the material and texture of the paint, he prefers a technique without visible brushstrokes and returns to more and thinner layers of paint.

The works presented in this exhibition, executed between 2019 and 2021, are the culmination of more than thirty years of meticulous experimentation.