Enoc Perez. Casitas

Brand New Gallery is pleased to present “Casitas”, the first solo gallery exhibition by Enoc Perez in Italy. On view the famous Perez’ series “Casitas”, small-scale oil on canvas works of Puerto Rican architecture. Perez is best known for his paintings of modernist buildings that nostalgically capture the utopian ambitions and optimism that inspired their construction. In “Casitas” Perez returns to using a brush, he’s known as a painter “who didn’t use a brush“, drawing on the Warholian legacy of printmaking. In this series he focalizes his attention on his home land, Puerto Rico, with a selection of semi-abstract but emotionally evocative Puerto Rican architectures, homelands which immigrants have left behind in order to pursue better lives in the US. The works conjure emotionally-charged memories that Latino immigrants carry with them as they pursue the American dream. These unpretentious paintings are named after places in Puerto Rico, and combine abstract elements with representations of small houses and fences in splattered fields of thick paint in primary colors, which evokes the haunting feeling of a distant past. They are filled with nostalgia, increased by the technique and the colors used by Perez.

Born in San Juan in 1967, Enoc Perez first took painting lessons at the age of eight. Son of an art critic, he spent family vacations traveling to museums in different countries and learning about art history. In 1986, Perez moved to New York to study painting at the Pratt Institute before earning his master’s degree at Hunter College. Finding himself at odds with the program at Hunter, where students and faculty criticized his paintings as overly seductive and decorative, Perez maintained his belief in the importance of the aesthetics in art. Embracing art’s potential for pleasure and beauty, Perez paints sensuous nudes, still lifes, tropical resorts, and modern architectural icons in a sleek aesthetic with dazzling, vibrant colors.  Enoc Perez (1967, born in San Juan, Puerto Rico) lives and works in New York. Enoc Perez graduated from Hunter College in New York in 1992. Perez’ works are in the collection of Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Juan, PR; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, FL; The British Museum, London, UK; Hammer Museum, University of California, Los Angeles, CA; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA, among the others. A solo show at the museum Dallas Contemporary is scheduled in 2018. He has exhibited his work widely internationally, including solo show at: The Philip Johnson Glass House, New Canaan, CT; Peter Blum Gallery, New York, NY; Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris, FR; Thomas Ammann Fine Arts AG, Zürich, CH; Acquavella Galleries, New York, NY; Corcoran Art Gallery, Washington D.C.; Faggionato Fine Arts, London, UK; Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York, NY; Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia, IT; Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami, Miami, FL; Elizabeth Dee, New York, NY; Kunstverein Heilbronn, Heilbronn, DE. Recent group exhibitions include: Konig Galerie, Berlin, DE; MCA Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; AD&A Museum, Santa Barbara, CA; Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia, IT; Tony Shafrazi Gallery, New York, NY; International Print Center, New York, NY; Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; Queens Museum of Art, New York, NY; El Museo del Barrio, New York, NY; Gagosian Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT; Triennale Bovisa, Milan, IT; UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Centre Pompidou, Paris,FR; Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, Frankfurt, DE.

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