Elizabeth Dee is pleased to announce an exhibition of new paintings by Enoc Perez in the gallery at 545 West 20th Street.  There will be an opening reception for the artist on Saturday, September 6, from 6 to 8 pm.

Perez’s recent canvases depict mid-century hotels in Puerto Rico.  Taken from photographs on vintage postcards or in guide books, as well as from his own snapshots, these paintings comprise a veritable typography of modernist architectural styles, from the Streamline Moderne of the Normandie to the rather generic International Style of the San Jeronimo Hilton to the Sputnik-era futurism of El Conquistador, Fajardo.  On an island with few imposing buildings, these luxury hotels commanded the skyline, as well as the imagination of the artist during his childhood in San Juan.  Taken as a whole, Monuments suggests a portrait of an age, a moment approximately from the 1940s to the 1960s, when the progressive ethos of modernism found a natural affinity with a burgeoning Puerto Rican economy heavily invested in tourism and industrialization.

Yet Perez’s project is not uncritical, as the hotels’ guests were wealthy tourists from the United States, and these images also speak to a legacy of colonialism and exploitation, and the essential economic disparity between those who stayed in the resorts and those who worked there.  That the portrayed structures have since been changed, renovated, re-used, and in some cases torn down, makes Perez’s images an ironic memorial to a simpler and more optimistic past, both his own and his homeland’s.

Rendered in the artist’s signature technique, a complex layering of multiple oil transfers, the surfaces of these paintings are beautifully lush and rich with the saturated greens, turquoises, purples and blacks of a Technicolor age.  Made without brushes, Perez’s images mimic his sources: printed in four-color photo-reproductive processes, a little dry and scratchy, and impassively documentary.  Perez re-invests these images with the poignance and paradox of the buildings’ histories.

Monuments is the artist’s second one-man exhibition with the gallery.  In 2002, he held a solo show at the Kunstverein in Heilbronn, Germany, and was included in Dear Painter. . ., an important group show seen at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Kunsthalle in Vienna, and the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt.  He will exhibit at The Happy Lion in Los Angeles in 2004.