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.
(Click to continue reading.)
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.
(Click to continue reading.)
