Pace Prints is pleased to present Unique Prints, an exhibition of new monoprint drawings by Emilio Perez, created in the Pace Editions studios in New York. This is Perez’s inaugural exhibition with Pace Prints.
In this new body of monoprints, Perez draws from the rhythmic elements of music and the visuals of psychedelic rock posters of the 1960s and ‘70s. Combining these components with his innate style of painting and drawing, he creates compositions of cadence, movement and depth.
Utilizing a hand colored background as the foundation for the screen print, Perez created his unique compositions by layering different combinations of screen printed images, reminiscent of the brushstrokes within his paintings. On top of these images, Perez then laid a transparent stenciling material that is used to create a drawing in dialogue with the printed imagery. The artist states:
It is at this precise point when the conversation truly happens- when I use the existing composition as a road map for what I am going to cut out, reacting to what is in front of me in the moment. Ultimately, it is this reaction, and the natural subconscious decision making, building off of the existing composition which gives the work a strong sense of movement and personality.
With this notion, Perez cuts the stenciling material with a blade, as he does with his paintings, to create a drawing in reaction to the printed image. Once the stencil is cut, the artist hand sprays the surface in colorations both relating to and competing with the colorations existing on the print. As the stencil is removed, it reveals the graphic marks which remain, visually reacting with the printed image. With one mark organically building around another, the composition evokes spontaneity, fluidity, and depth along with the aspect of chance, giving each work it’s own personality.
Perez is known as a painter’s painter, combining the inherent aspects of painting with drawing in his unique stylistic process. His work is a combination of the spontaneity and expressiveness of painting (purposefully in its loosest form) and the immediacy and graphic quality of drawing. The artist generates his kinetic imagery by pushing paint in across a canvas, building layer over layer, and then going back into the painting to “draw” with a blade cutting his marks. Melding foreground and background, Perez’s hand-cut marks ebb and flow between layers like the fluidity of ocean currents.
Born in 1972 in New York, Emilio Perez attended Pratt Institute and University of Florida’s New World School of the Arts. Perez’s works can be found in the permanent collections of the Miami Art Museum; Albright-Knox Art Gallery; and Arkansas Art Center, Little Rock; and in corporate collections, internationally. The artist’s paintings were featured in the exhibitions Topographies at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; and Signs of the Apocalypse/Rapture at the Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago. Perez had solo exhibitions with Galerie Lelong in both New York and Paris and has been featured in group exhibitions in Dusseldorf, Philadelphia, Houston and St. Louis, among others. The artist currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.