Artist Interview: Enoc Perez
By Sacha Mendel
September 23, 2015
Renown for his utopian paintings of building structures and provocative nudes, Enoc Perez is exhibiting his collection, One World Trade Center, at the Peter Blum Gallery in New York City. In this interview, Perez shares with Arthena a little about New York, the art world and his development in it.
Arthena: What is the art for you?
Enoc Perez: Making art is my oasis. Art is the one thing that I need to do every day, it's my compulsion. The art world is the people that you work with, coexist, tolerate and sometimes befriend. Also the people that love art, profit from art and theorize about it. The market is something that is real and it is good to understand, I'm not an expert on it but it can be capricious and cruel. At times good. The important thing for me is the art itself regardless of the market. That's what I signed up for.
A: What has inspired the growth of your work?
EP: The masters, great artists, are to me those that I trust to look and study for many years. I started to look at New York artists before coming to the city at age nineteen, at the time Warhol, Jean Michel Basquiat, and Twombly were at the top of my list, they still are. In terms of process, from Warhol, I got the idea of using ways of printmaking into painting. From Basquiat the use of oil sticks and from Twombly the preoccupation with Mark making. Using printmaking in the process of painting is a New York thing and it is imperative to make sense within your context.
In terms of changes in my work, that is something central to me, I like to accomplish something new every time I work, otherwise boredom gets to me. And even myself I look in the mirror and every day I change. So the work changes as well as I hopefully evolve.