Enoc PerezCaribe Club

Enoc Pérez was born in Puerto Rico in 1967 and lives today in New York. The striking thing about his painting is the texture of the paint, the shimmering surfaces whose tactile quality strongly invites verification by touch. The particular secret of realist painting handled in this way lies, of course, in the application of the paint. And here Enoc Pérez is a manic worker. With great precision he lays out areas of colour and forms, only to transfer them layer by layer onto the canvas using a kind of frottage technique. Once he has completed a picture, all interest in this process is suddenly gone, for with the first viewing of the finished picture what we might call „romantic appropriation“ automatically begins. For on the one hand Enoc Pérez has a predilection for painting women who, through his manner of painting, not only possess something enigmatically attractive but are also, precisely in compromising poses, wholly enveloped in a mystical aura. This produces an irritation that is aimed directly at desire. On the other hand, Enoc Pérez takes great pleasure in painting wonderfully attractive modern hotels and pools from the 1940s to the 1970s, which make no attempt to disguise their paradisiacal setting amid palms and lush vegetation. It is not only the dream of Caribbean luxury that is located here; rather, desire leaps somnambulantly from the portraits of women into the supposed Garden of Eden and fuses the two subjects into one. Many would gladly die here. And yet a contradiction creeps in. This is not because Enoc Pérez copies his motifs from photographic snapshots; rather, he appears to work to some extent with irregular croppings, thereby shifting attraction and paradise ever so imperceptibly. The degree to which this shift is perceived, however, he leaves – every inch the trained Romantic – to the viewer of his pictures.