Enoc Perez
31 Oct - 20 Dec 2008
ENOC PEREZ
Tender
Perez Particularly - Mark von Schlegell
Excerpt of the catalogue text Tender, Snoeck Verlag, 2008
The paintings of Enoc Perez are instantly recognizable. The peculiar surface screens a pathos across their photoimagery that ingeniously denudes the images of both their privacy and their public iconic significance. Their surface renders the pictures as painting. It is an oddity, therefore, that Perez‘s surface effects are the result of a turn away from painting, to drawing. The surface points us to a central theoretical motion perceivable in the artist‘s paintings, a turning between schools of art, culture, and influence. There is no resolution of this motion, no final theoretical destination or quasi-historical statement. There is only, at last, a painting. This by itself may be taken as a final statement.
But what sort of painting? Only materiel defines it. Certainly the images do not. Perez layers pictures selected from postcards, downloaded images, or the artist‘s personal polaroids, by pressing paper backed with wet oil-stick monochromes against a canvas or paper, and drawing on its surface. The drawing is peeled away to leave a layer of printed paint.
The drawing, the rough imprint of the artist‘s hand, works actively in competition with the images and their postmodern and sometimes pop familiarity. If as Sontag said, following Barthes, a photograph is „not only an image (as a painting is an image)... it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask“, Perez removed the selected photograph‘s privilege to the real, with the real hand of the artist, of the printer, of the craft.
The final painting is the record of an event in time, a series of events against, or on top of the photograph‘s. In its final effect the process can be reminiscent of other artists, of Warhol for instance, or Tuymans, but in regards to its curious relation to the image and in its declaration of the time of painting, one might call it peculiarly Perez.
The link of concept and craft embodied in the process has turned inside-out, between photograph, drawing and painting, opening inside a dawning modernism beyond the modern, the post-modern and perhaps even the contemporary. This dawning modernism, the original dream of it, is never complete, it is itself a turning away and a turning into - which, it must be said, does in fact contain its own critique. There are few historical icons of this Modernism who have not presented themselves, for instance, as a pornographer.
Perez shows himself a generation apart from both the forceful ancient modern of Picasso and Pound and the difficult post-modern of Godard, particularly in how his work moves beyond the modern/primitive delusion in Freud that even in post-modernism via Deleuze and Guattari, continues to hamper modernism‘s reclamation of the ancient. Art itself, after post-modernism, has come to see itself both as anti-Oedipal and as scarlet emblem of modernity‘s never to be realized desires. Only pornography for Perez offers an end to pornography beyond fantasy. Only modernism itself offers a cinema able to penetrate its own ever-elusive infinite. Only painting, finally, will emblem desires that can be said to be neither modern, nor primitive, but real.
Perez‘s paintings, of course, are most particularly themselves in the real. Selectively scaled, smelling of oil smeared and printed, they answer desires of the art-viewer as sensual, phenomenological events in a real world that is built by such objects. Modernity‘s „discovery“ of the surface of painting, very like its „discovery“ of the primitive, was of course tightly linked to the surface‘s destruction in mechanical reproduction. It is peculiarly left to the denizens of the new century not only to rediscover the lie of that first discovery but to discover anew the lie of the surface‘s destruction.
In Perez‘s own life, the painter‘s resolute determination to remove the brush from his canvasses and return to a protoprinting, as he likes to tell it, came first as a discovery. A discovery, however, of a method. Perez‘s paintings present amethod as a way out beyond the influences of the modern and the post-modern alike - and into the always-primitive always-modern world as it remains for art to trace and to make anew.
Tender
Perez Particularly - Mark von Schlegell
Excerpt of the catalogue text Tender, Snoeck Verlag, 2008
The paintings of Enoc Perez are instantly recognizable. The peculiar surface screens a pathos across their photoimagery that ingeniously denudes the images of both their privacy and their public iconic significance. Their surface renders the pictures as painting. It is an oddity, therefore, that Perez‘s surface effects are the result of a turn away from painting, to drawing. The surface points us to a central theoretical motion perceivable in the artist‘s paintings, a turning between schools of art, culture, and influence. There is no resolution of this motion, no final theoretical destination or quasi-historical statement. There is only, at last, a painting. This by itself may be taken as a final statement.
But what sort of painting? Only materiel defines it. Certainly the images do not. Perez layers pictures selected from postcards, downloaded images, or the artist‘s personal polaroids, by pressing paper backed with wet oil-stick monochromes against a canvas or paper, and drawing on its surface. The drawing is peeled away to leave a layer of printed paint.
The drawing, the rough imprint of the artist‘s hand, works actively in competition with the images and their postmodern and sometimes pop familiarity. If as Sontag said, following Barthes, a photograph is „not only an image (as a painting is an image)... it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask“, Perez removed the selected photograph‘s privilege to the real, with the real hand of the artist, of the printer, of the craft.
The final painting is the record of an event in time, a series of events against, or on top of the photograph‘s. In its final effect the process can be reminiscent of other artists, of Warhol for instance, or Tuymans, but in regards to its curious relation to the image and in its declaration of the time of painting, one might call it peculiarly Perez.
The link of concept and craft embodied in the process has turned inside-out, between photograph, drawing and painting, opening inside a dawning modernism beyond the modern, the post-modern and perhaps even the contemporary. This dawning modernism, the original dream of it, is never complete, it is itself a turning away and a turning into - which, it must be said, does in fact contain its own critique. There are few historical icons of this Modernism who have not presented themselves, for instance, as a pornographer.
Perez shows himself a generation apart from both the forceful ancient modern of Picasso and Pound and the difficult post-modern of Godard, particularly in how his work moves beyond the modern/primitive delusion in Freud that even in post-modernism via Deleuze and Guattari, continues to hamper modernism‘s reclamation of the ancient. Art itself, after post-modernism, has come to see itself both as anti-Oedipal and as scarlet emblem of modernity‘s never to be realized desires. Only pornography for Perez offers an end to pornography beyond fantasy. Only modernism itself offers a cinema able to penetrate its own ever-elusive infinite. Only painting, finally, will emblem desires that can be said to be neither modern, nor primitive, but real.
Perez‘s paintings, of course, are most particularly themselves in the real. Selectively scaled, smelling of oil smeared and printed, they answer desires of the art-viewer as sensual, phenomenological events in a real world that is built by such objects. Modernity‘s „discovery“ of the surface of painting, very like its „discovery“ of the primitive, was of course tightly linked to the surface‘s destruction in mechanical reproduction. It is peculiarly left to the denizens of the new century not only to rediscover the lie of that first discovery but to discover anew the lie of the surface‘s destruction.
In Perez‘s own life, the painter‘s resolute determination to remove the brush from his canvasses and return to a protoprinting, as he likes to tell it, came first as a discovery. A discovery, however, of a method. Perez‘s paintings present amethod as a way out beyond the influences of the modern and the post-modern alike - and into the always-primitive always-modern world as it remains for art to trace and to make anew.