View of the exhibition Enoc Pérez at Galerie 75 Faubourg, Paris, France. Photo: Nicolas Brasseur. © 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.
Born in 1967 in Puerto Rico where he grew up, Enoc Pérez currently lives and works in New York. After studying art at Hunter College (New York), then at the Pratt Institute (New York), Enoc Pérez worked for three years with artist Andrés Bueso. He describes himself as “a husband, a father, a painter, a Puerto Rican, an American” (Enoc Pérez interviewed by Stéphane Timonier, August 2021). Pérez was represented among others by Mitchell-Innes & Nash, Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Acquavella Gallery, before joining Ben Brown Fine Arts in 2019. His works are also included in several public collections such as the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (San Francisco).
Enoc Pérez at Galerie 75 Faubourg, Paris, France, 2021. Photo : Nicolas Brasseur.
Crash, 2021. Photo : Nicolas Brasseur. © Enoc Pérez
At the end of the 90s, Enoc Pérez 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, Pérez 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 Pérez admires or finds intriguing: artists, musicians, celebrities. During the lockdown, he diversifies his subjects: cars in flames, airplanes, and a return to architectural imagery.