Enoc PEREZ (Puerto Rican, b. 1967) Enoc Perez is a contemporary Puerto Rican artist best known for his paintings and oil stick drawings of Modernist architecture. In his colorful renderings, the artist often employs a loose, abstract style, giving his work a sketch-like quality. “It's a matter of attraction—attraction to the building, to the object, to what I'm going to paint,” the artist has said of his work. “In terms of architecture, I see buildings as ready-mades, in the Duchampian sense. I see them as metaphors, and I respond to metaphors almost physically—I know whether a building is something I want to use pretty much immediately.” Perez’s work reflects his belief in the importance of pleasure in art. His works display a sleek aesthetic, complemented with vibrant colors. Perez paints nudes, still lifes, and tropical settings, but is best known for his paintings of modernist architecture. Through these paintings of architecture, Perez conveys his nostalgia for the architects’ belief in utopia. For twenty years, Perez worked with a printmaking method he created that mimics the color printing process, before returning to painting in 2010. Inspired by Andy Warhol, Jackson Pollock, Jasper Johns, and Roy Lichtenstein’s exploration of alternative techniques of mark-making, Perez mimics the process of color printing by making preparatory drawings for each color in a composition and using sheets to transfer oil paint to the canvas. However, he has since returned to the paintbrush. Born in 1967 in San Juan, Puerto Rico, Perez developed an interest in painting by age eight. He obtained a BFA from the Pratt Institute and an MFA from Hunter College, both in New York. While living in the city, he studied the architecture of Midtown Manhattan and created paintings depicting several of the city’s most iconic landmarks, including the United Nations building, Lever House, and the Seagram Building. Today, his works are held in the collections of the Corcoran Art Gallery in Washington, D.C., the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, among others. Perez lives and works in New York, NY.