“If Hugh Hefner and Alexander Calder had a child, this is what it would look like,” says the artist Enoc Perez of his “Cut Shapes” series. Currently on display at Danziger Gallery, the photo collages emerged from his paintings of nudes that he deemed not up to par. “I had a lot in storage and I thought, ‘What do I do with these?'” he says. “So, I started to add abstractions, like ‘little Calders,’ and each turned out to be a better painting” — and to play with censorship, plenty of which Perez has encountered on Instagram. (“You have no idea how many posts of mine have been taken down because they don’t meet the community standards,” he says.) He then decided to pull pictures of women from their social media accounts and apply the same principle, both an organic extension of his practice and a response to the age of digital sharing. “And,” Perez continues, “I like covering certain parts because people’s imaginations complete the job.”
“Cut Shapes” is installed alongside the late Inge Morath’s “Masquerades,” a set of portraits that depicts the subjects clad in Saul Steinberg-designed paper-bag masks, photographed from 1959 to 1963. As a self- described Morath fan, Perez notes that he’s in good company — and “this type of show makes more sense than grouping you with artists of your own generation that you might not have anything to do with,” he says. “These are the types of relationships I want to see in the art world.”