Enoc Pérez

Acquired directly from the artist

Ridgefield, The Aldridge Contemporary Art Museum, Painting the Glass House: Artists Revisit Modern Architecture, March - July 2009, illustrated in color

This work is in very good condition overall. There is very light wear and handling at the edges and scattered surface accretions that appear to be inherent to the artist's working method. Under Ultraviolet light inspection, there is no evidence of restoration. Unframed.
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Havana Riviera Hotel, La Havana, Cuba embodies the most sought after imagery, stylistic moorings, and beautifully affected handling by Puerto Rican artist, Enoc Pérez.  Born in San Juan, Puerto Rico in 1967, Pérez received his M.F.A. from Hunter College and B.F.A. from the Pratt Institute. Studying in New York, Pérez was greatly influenced by the New York artists of the 80s that surrounded him. Still, Pérez sought to create his own, original visual vocabulary and trademarked a technique that defined him amongst his peers. With his unique painting method, the artist would apply each layer of paint via an intermediary piece of paper. His figuration was therefore achieved by unorthodox means, a process most akin to mechanical printing.

From 2001 to 2005, Pérez focused his artistic output on rendering paintings of archetypal modernist architecture in the Caribbean and Latin America. His paintings from this period brilliantly couple technical ability and aesthetic beauty, imbuing the structures with a palpable sense of nostalgia. Structures were chosen due to their complexity, inventiveness, beauty and metaphorical significance.

Pérez's buildings possess an optimism tinged with the sadness of an impossible utopia. His architectural subjects often seem both futuristic and nostalgic, and Havana Riviera Hotel, La Havana, Cuba is a perfect example of this. It is filled with the paradoxical notion of dreams fulfilled and un-fulfilled, set in the complex reality of life in communist Cuba. In his architectural paintings of the Caribbean, Pérez casts a shadow of irony as they make reference to the presence of colonialism and totalitarianism. According to Pérez, these buildings symbolize an era when ideas of possibility and found material form and became an aesthetic movement. Layers of attenuated but vibrant color are coupled with a sophisticated economy of handling, recalling the profound impact of Pérez's New York artistic influences: Warhol, Twombly and Serra. The body of paintings that Pérez produced from 2001-2005 were the focus of a major survey exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Miami in 2007, and Pérez has exhibited in museums and galleries in the Americas and Europe, including the Centre Pompidou, Paris, the UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, and The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Connecticut.