Carlos Perez

2011 tchinfoo

“tchinfoo” (2011)

Carlos Perez assembles his childhood memories and adult life-experiences into a symbiotic body: the adult attempts to give form to the undecipherable pain which darkened his first years, and draws from the imagination and spontaneity of childhood a panacea for his present-day demons. His work is the result of this inextricable tangle. With no premeditation, Carlos Perez imagines characters and develops them, following only his inspiration. Soft spheres, triangular peaks, winged extensions… there is only one constant: no mouth, just two hardly visible strokes for the eyes. Kept thus to their irreducible contours, the creatures of Carlos Perez, quiet and restrained, glow with an ageless wisdom. He first replicates them using black spray-paint on large Japanese papers, thus retaining only from graffiti the speed, the precision and the indelibility of the gesture. As it saturates the silky paper, the black spray-paint is metamorphosed into a delicate velvet with vaporous outlines; whilst the invented forms become ethereal creatures, both pervasive and terribly fragile. Turned into sculptures, the characters of Carlos Perez naturally recall the universe of Takashi Murakami and the aesthetics of mangas, but also a more poetic and ascetic facet of Japanese art. Carved directly into the plaster block, the creatures of Carlos Perez are powdery-white spheroids retaining every piece of their fragility and mystery. Lastly, Carlos Perez puts together a short animation film in which one of his characters is seen drifting alone in a bare, monochromatic universe reduced to an unearthly skyline. On the soundtrack of Henry Purcell’s poignant opera, the character meets various creatures on the course of his lonely wanderings. Attracted like a moth towards the light, he seems to observe them, to sense them, to speak to them perhaps; but then moves away slowly, chagrined not to have recognized the one whose presence he so eagerly seeks. Thus following the scenario of the Little Prince from Saint-Exupéry, Carlos Perez recounts to us his own journey as an adult to accept the unfair and inescapable disappearance of his father. The constructed universe of Carlos Perez functions as an evolutionary work with multiple dimensions. Each one of its newly-sharpened facets is rooted in the same necessity – pulling out past pains from raw experience. With one primary weapon: a softness that envelops and protects as much as it chokes and sickens.
© Carlos Perez