Nostalgic Triumph

PÉREZ'S DREAMY DESTINATIONS

Enoc Perez is an artist obsessed with love, with the intangibility of experience and all that is elusive or ephemeral. His is the palette of memory. At 38, the Puerto Rican-born Perez paints without brushes; his images are produced using a hybrid frottage technique, building the painting layer upon layer and color on color, a process not unlike the mechanical method of Warhol's silkscreens, or the frame-by-frame construction of a film. His paintings—portraits of women and renderings of buildings such as grand hotels and of resort architecture of the 1950s and 60s—echo like snapshots or diary entries, dreamlike, fractured, full of desire, infused with Utopian hope and a late-20th-century sense of loss. "I wanted to affect the way the medium was used from within," says Perez, who describes himself as a melancholy romantic with a deeply Latin-American sensibility. "When you affect the way things are made, you can create work that can be radical without being blatantly radical." A show of his works on paper opens this spring at New York's Faggionato Fine Art, and in the fall an exhibition of paintings will be displayed at MitchellInnes & Nash; a 2007 project for Lever House is also under way. "I hope to be remembered as an artist who discovered a new way of making paintings," Perez continues, "a technique that allows me to eliminate gesture, leaving only color and line."

A. M. HOMES

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