Gallery Talk with Enoc Perez and Christina Mossaides Strassfield: Saturday, May 22 at 3pm

Moran & Spiga Gallery 
Curator: Christina Strassfield 

Enoc Perez is a  contemporary  Puerto Rican born multimedia  artist best known for his paintings and oil stick drawings. Perez’s Guild Hall exhibition, Paradise, will explore the theme of natural disasters. 

 This exhibition will present a new body of work comprising six paintings that refer to the Lipstick Building (1986), an elliptical office tower in Manhattan designed by architects Philip Johnson and John Burgee. In each work, Perez uses his characteristic style to explore the formal qualities of the Lipstick Building in a variety of palettes.

Where his previous works focused on exteriors, The Cinematic Self furthers his tradition of imagining beautiful spaces usually filled with people rendered completely empty. “I made these beautiful paintings of these modernist buildings,” Perez told Interview. “A lot of those buildings today are in ruins. They’re abandoned. That was the utopia I was painting 25 years ago.”

Some artists paint portraits. New York–based artist Enoc Perez has made modernist architecture his subject. Painting in a slashing overlay style that seems to channel both Andy Warhol and Franz Kline, in Liberty & Restraint, an exhibition that opened last month at the Dallas Contemporary and eight locations throughout the city, he investigates the gallery of local buildings designed by architect Philip Johnson. MODERN’s associate editor Sammy Dalati caught up with Perez at his cavernous studio in Astoria Queens, and asked him about his process and his inspiration for the show.

In vivid washes of color; in overlaid stencil-like images; and in bronze sculptures of massed, crumpled-up forms, artist Enoc Perez uses a multimedia approach reminiscent of Warhol and Rauschenberg to both celebrate and satirize some of the 20th century’s best-known buildings. In Dallas this month, he’s turned his sights on controversial modern designer Philip Johnson: In a show sponsored by local art museum Dallas Contemporary, Perez has created works featuring Johnson’s buildings, and then installed some of them inside the buildings themselves (of which Dallas has no fewer than six). The artist took a break from the museum opening to talk about the intrigues and the afterlife of America’s most infamous architectural gadfly.

Known for his paintings of modernist buildings, artist Enoc Perez is pushing his work in bold new directions

By 
Stephen Wallis
November 1, 2013

Perez’s signature works—large, seductive paintings of modernist buildings, from hotels in his native Puerto Rico to icons such as New York’s Lever House and Chicago’s Marina City towers—are owned by major museums and influential collectors like Peter Brant and Aby Rosen. The earliest examples were made via a meticulous process of transferring oil-stick drawings to canvas, sometimes dozens of layers of them, by hand.