Enoc Perez

Lower East Side Printshop published Fontainebleau, Miami by Enoc Perez to benefit its non-profit print fair program, Editions/Artists’ Books Fair in 2014. Continuing his exploration of modernist buildings and their architectural allure, both symbolically and aesthetically, Perez has revisited the distinguished Fontainebleau Hotel building (Miami, FL) as a subject. Perez approaches his motif as a painterly abstraction, through a very sensuous treatment of color, vibrant texture, and composition. Ultimately, the prints offers both a bold point of view and a sense of effortless completion.

Lower East Side Printshop published a suite of four screenprints, Lever House by Enoc Perez, through its prestigious Publishing Residency program in 2011.

Early in his career, Enoc Perez posed a challenge for himself, “How do you make a painting that acknowledges art history and, hopefully, moves it forward?” [quoted by Hilarie M. Sheets, “A Method to Their Sadness,” Artnews, December 2008, p. 115]  Warhol’s screenprints had particularly piqued his interest in “manufacturing” art, and Perez developed a unique approach to painting that is akin to printmaking.  Setting aside the brush for nearly twenty years, he constructed his paintings by first making a series of identical drawings after an image–a photograph, postcard, a picture in a book.  He then covered the back of each drawing with a different color oil stick (his intuitive color separations).  He retraced each drawing, while it was pressed against a canvas, transferring the oil stick to the fabric, building up the painting layer by layer to produce unique marks and textured effects.

He applied this highly personal painting technique to a variety of subjects:  architecture, the figure, beachfront resorts, and rum bottles.  His buildings he perceives “as metaphors, as abstractions.  I like how architecture can embody ideas, ‘the future,’ progress, enlightenment, optimism…an abstract reflection of current society” (quoted by Brandon Johnson in Zing Magazine, May 2010).  In 2007 he was invited to exhibit five paintings of Lever House, one of his favorite architectural subjects, in that landmark’s lobby, and to celebrate this event, the building’s owner commissioned a print.  That screenprint was the basis of the new suite of four prints, Lever House (Indigo, Purple, Red, and Silver), created in collaboration with Lower East Side Printshop’s director Dusica Kirjakovic, and master printers, James Miller and Erik Hougen.  While some of Perez’s earlier projects with LESP, including Teatro Popularde Niterói, Brazil, had involved a complex sequence of scanning, printing and hand-coloring, which Perez felt appropriate to a lyrical, cultural complex, he here rejected hand-work in favor of pure screenprinting, which he considered more suitable to the Lever House as a mechanistic image of power.

The commissioned screenprint was scanned and considerably enlarged, which to a degree degraded and abstracted the image.  Perez has frequently explored the drama of light in conflict with dark, and in this suite, he anchored all the prints with what was a negative scan of the 2007 print.  He built up the four images with layers of screened color, varying the palette in each to realize dramatically different effects.  Silver retains considerable architectural solidity, though the building dissolves at the top into the sky and into darkness at the base, visually reinforced by accents of silver. Silver ink also underlies Indigo, but Perez alters the chill of Silver with a cascade of blues and indigos that transforms stormy day into ominous night.  Purple is submerged in pinks and violets, and the windows, in contrast to the blue and black accents in Indigo or the icy grays in Silver, here take on a fiery glow.  Red, built upon the same warm and light Cadmium Red ink that underlies Purple, appears on the brink of an apocalyptic melt-down. The dark sky in Purple is illuminated in Red by some possibly catastrophic event. In both Indigo and Purple a set of windows is opened to reveal an underlying layer of color: silver in Indigo, and bright red in Purple.  Throughout the series, the windows are printed purposefully out-of-register in a nervous syncopation, unsettling the very foundations of Lever House.

Perez seems to question the rational aesthetic of the International Style and its utopian promises. His reflections on Modernist architecture in the past have suggested a feeling of quiet melancholy and loss.  As his recent work on canvas has become increasingly abstract, with tactile layers of colorful paint, freely applied now with a brush, Perez in the Lever House suite similarly dissolves form into vibrating patterns of vivid color.  Warhol’s implacable cool has been replaced by anxiety and uncertainty, perhaps a testament to our times.

Except from Editions ’12 by Roberta Waddell