ERIC PERÉZ
Artist Statement
"The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space." - Marco Polo, in Invisible Cities, by Italo Calvino
In tandem with this urge, I seek to restitute images in my work, or at least in the modest universe within my reach; to restore the potential that has been lost, slowly but surely, since their blind proliferation began. It is patently obvious that we live in an atmosphere literally saturated with information, a great deal of which is visual. In this contemporary Babel, everything is atomized and relativized to such a degree that nothing matters in and of itself, because the importance of things and of ideas has been reduced to those few seconds during which we pay attention to them, the correlation of an increasingly fragmented, degraded and scattered spiritual existence. In my work, I propose to invert these terms and create out of a multiple, diverse, mental pulp unitary works that bring together, conjoin, articulate, and amalgamate several levels of experience into an image, as a modest contribution to the art of making more room and of making things last.
What I paint emerges from the mind, and experience is the raw fuel. By experience, I mean a mental image gratuitously acquired by the sole fact of being alive and with an alert consciousness, despite the fact that many experiences may be oneiric, while others are lived in wakefulness and still others, heard or read. Memory is the vessel into which these experiences are poured, losing the excessive detail any photograph can provide, but on the other hand, becoming enriched through amalgamation with other images, ideas, influences; and transfigured, thus, into a hybrid entity that flows out into a painting that is sometimes narrative, with disturbing details, and other times a poetic image, nothing more. This emphasis on experience has to do with the fact that in a world oversaturated with wholesale data and stimuli, it is very easy to peel away from one’s self and navigate through so many worlds, that one ends up becoming diluted and swarming about like an atom. Working with experience is the equivalent to erecting a symbolic portal between the outside world and the inner mind: what enters as life experience (what is dreamed, heard, read) exists and carries weight.
The choice of the kind of experiences that I find stimulating has a lot to do with a certain kind of symbolic otherness: living in a megalopolis like Mexico City, it seems clear that my daily experiences are a far cry from those that emerge in my paintings. This is about experiences of another order, ones that emerge from moments when nature represents in a symbolic context something that is important to human beings or, to put it more humbly, to me as a human being: states of mind or consciousness. The elements that link with greater intensity both the natural and the psychic realms tend to be more than forms: they are subtle substances, such as lighting or atmospheres, that connect, in turn, with substances that often are not even visible in our experiences, such as aromas or temperatures.
Despite the fact that a great deal of the iconographic elements and pictorial language I use are linked to 19th century painting, this does not imply a dogmatic or traditionalist attitude that disowns the present or idealizes the past per se; my figures do not evade what they are, because they are mental fragments of myself, and I do not consider myself to be anything other than someone who travels through existence in order to paint what he has seen, with no constrictions other than those I have chosen to adopt as points of view.
This selection of a point of view implies not only choosing the nature of what is being represented, but the medium and the language as well. In my case, this means figurative painting and oil on canvas. My adoption of a technique and its baggage of conventions that are, apparently, nothing new, has more to do with how well suited they are to revealing two-fold a reality that is both visible and mental as an allegation in defense of painting. But this pragmatic use is, in and of itself, the highest sort of praise. I cannot imagine a better medium to link a mental process with a concrete reality than that which is provided by “old” painting. Rarely has it been truer that the medium is the message, because this is not only about a set of linguistic instruments, but all sorts of knowledge. On another level, I have no problem with the fact that the exercise of this “redundant” practice goes against the acritical grain that dominates contemporary art circles, or the standardizing logic of hypermodernity that finds it hard to digest.
In tandem with this urge, I seek to restitute images in my work, or at least in the modest universe within my reach; to restore the potential that has been lost, slowly but surely, since their blind proliferation began. It is patently obvious that we live in an atmosphere literally saturated with information, a great deal of which is visual. In this contemporary Babel, everything is atomized and relativized to such a degree that nothing matters in and of itself, because the importance of things and of ideas has been reduced to those few seconds during which we pay attention to them, the correlation of an increasingly fragmented, degraded and scattered spiritual existence. In my work, I propose to invert these terms and create out of a multiple, diverse, mental pulp unitary works that bring together, conjoin, articulate, and amalgamate several levels of experience into an image, as a modest contribution to the art of making more room and of making things last.
What I paint emerges from the mind, and experience is the raw fuel. By experience, I mean a mental image gratuitously acquired by the sole fact of being alive and with an alert consciousness, despite the fact that many experiences may be oneiric, while others are lived in wakefulness and still others, heard or read. Memory is the vessel into which these experiences are poured, losing the excessive detail any photograph can provide, but on the other hand, becoming enriched through amalgamation with other images, ideas, influences; and transfigured, thus, into a hybrid entity that flows out into a painting that is sometimes narrative, with disturbing details, and other times a poetic image, nothing more. This emphasis on experience has to do with the fact that in a world oversaturated with wholesale data and stimuli, it is very easy to peel away from one’s self and navigate through so many worlds, that one ends up becoming diluted and swarming about like an atom. Working with experience is the equivalent to erecting a symbolic portal between the outside world and the inner mind: what enters as life experience (what is dreamed, heard, read) exists and carries weight.
The choice of the kind of experiences that I find stimulating has a lot to do with a certain kind of symbolic otherness: living in a megalopolis like Mexico City, it seems clear that my daily experiences are a far cry from those that emerge in my paintings. This is about experiences of another order, ones that emerge from moments when nature represents in a symbolic context something that is important to human beings or, to put it more humbly, to me as a human being: states of mind or consciousness. The elements that link with greater intensity both the natural and the psychic realms tend to be more than forms: they are subtle substances, such as lighting or atmospheres, that connect, in turn, with substances that often are not even visible in our experiences, such as aromas or temperatures.
Despite the fact that a great deal of the iconographic elements and pictorial language I use are linked to 19th century painting, this does not imply a dogmatic or traditionalist attitude that disowns the present or idealizes the past per se; my figures do not evade what they are, because they are mental fragments of myself, and I do not consider myself to be anything other than someone who travels through existence in order to paint what he has seen, with no constrictions other than those I have chosen to adopt as points of view.
This selection of a point of view implies not only choosing the nature of what is being represented, but the medium and the language as well. In my case, this means figurative painting and oil on canvas. My adoption of a technique and its baggage of conventions that are, apparently, nothing new, has more to do with how well suited they are to revealing two-fold a reality that is both visible and mental as an allegation in defense of painting. But this pragmatic use is, in and of itself, the highest sort of praise. I cannot imagine a better medium to link a mental process with a concrete reality than that which is provided by “old” painting. Rarely has it been truer that the medium is the message, because this is not only about a set of linguistic instruments, but all sorts of knowledge. On another level, I have no problem with the fact that the exercise of this “redundant” practice goes against the acritical grain that dominates contemporary art circles, or the standardizing logic of hypermodernity that finds it hard to digest.