GABRIEL LUIS PEREZ
The DIADEM Art Papers Interview
Collector and DIADEM contributor Michael Cavendish (“DD”) interviewed Los Angeles-based artist Gabriel Luis Perez (“GLP”) on November 13, 2015.
DD: I really want to talk about a painting you made in 2014, Rise of the Duke. It is a riotous, circus-like, but somehow mis en place artwork, with 3-D elements, post-Rasuchenberg elements, that seem to swim out from the paint, organically. What is this glorious thing you are doing here?
GLP: Two summers ago, I ran out of canvas to stretch and funds to purchase more, so I began to use a stockpile of clothes and fabric my mother and I had been collecting for decades.
I would patch scraps together, mostly denim and canvas, ‘til I had something large enough to stretch. This is something I still do when canvas gets low and I am left with just a few scraps that could add up to something.
The fabric and clothes quickly ended up on the surface of the canvas as well, being used as paint marks.
These new marks would get sewn on by machine or hand, pinned on, painted on, or even glued on. It became a process of combining traditional painting techniques with my background in costume design, two skills I had segregated from each other.
Rise Of The Duke is a clown costume, of sorts, as many of my paintings are. I’m a former circus clown who made all his own costumes; I continue to create this personality in my work.
Other personalities from my costumed past emerge as well; cabaret dancer, freak, rock star, drag queen, but Rise Of The Duke is definitely me as a clown.
I am a fast-paced, bombastic clown — not safe for work or children.
While I am attractive, witty, and lovable, I use subtlety and force to dominate a space. This is Rise Of The Duke, a fun bouncy thing with sweeping black fabric waves of calm, stabbed with pushpins, singing loudly so you can notice it, but standing still-ish against the wall, trying to conform by wearing his best version of a tux.
DD: The composition in the painting is really something. So much chaos sorting itself into these cabinets of space you create, that the primordial cells in the eye agree with. How hard is it to paint whatever comes after a painting like this? Is there a voice inside you saying, well, go in another direction now, because you won’t be pulling that much bravado in composition off again anytime soon?
GLP: Great question! I’m trying to hit home runs every time I step to the canvas (plate). Not every home run comes in the same way and I accept and expect that.
It is very important for me to make work that evolves and does not repeat itself too much, or look like a scrambled version of the last painting I made. Or that does not pigeonhole me into a style or label. Art has no rules, and that is the most important rule for my work.
I have a heavy set of skills and visual statements that have become my own and that I may lean on. I am constantly trying new ways to make and visions to see. I aim to arrive at something new every time.
My paintings live together and come from the same place so there is water from the same well to be found in the work. But I treat every painting independently, so it will present its’ own personality.
As you say, there is a chaos that exists in my work. In several of my paintings as well as within my entire body of work; there is a disparateness that gets held together by some heady strands.
I ask alot of my viewers, giving them the power to discover connections from painting to painting, and leaving compositional breaks to be completed by a viewer’s eye.
I don’t have all the answers and I am in constant discovery, but who would I be if I didn’t aim for the fence every time? If I didn’t trust myself?
Improvisation is good when it comes from a place of discipline, knowledge, recklessness. Every painting is a new one, trying to outdo the last!
DD: When you are painting in this style achieved in ROTD, are you, on the inside, a gestural painter, a colorist, or something else?
GLP: I approached this painting as a printmaker actually, starting by screenprinting the raw canvas with an old screen.
From there the layering became an interlocking puzzle game, with elements on top and emerging from previous layers.
The shallow depth is reminiscent of a multi-colored print whose layers try so hard to achieve space but constantly remind us of their boundaries.
I get a little more depth by adding texture to the work, but I am constantly trying to push everything to the surface with little to no illusory depth.
So I guess colorist could be tacked on to printmaker since the push/pull is also achieved through contrasting colors.
DD: You have an arresting hue of orange you work with, as in your painting Orange Bars All Day. This is a painting that vectors toward the middle American romanticism of a John Cougar Mellencamp song, with combine elements that look like off-white wedding ephemera, mixed with blue jean denim as the faux canvas surface, but then, but then, you put these punches of broken lines of orange in the center, and they take over. What in the world is going on there? And what do you call this bewitching orange color?
GLP: I love using “safety orange” or what I’ll call “watch out!” orange. It’s a warning sign color that warns you of danger but also begs for attention.
Orange Bars All Day needed this orange punch in the face after I had built it up to be a tiara-ed Texas beauty contestant, or a small town homecoming queen with the biggest mum on the block.
This was the actual starting point as I sewed stretch denim jeans together as the canvas and handmade three homecoming corsages. Contrastingly the white surface is built up with punk rock patches, studs, safety pins, and ephemera.
DD: Another painting you did in 2013, which I believe was while you were doing an MFA, Headband, is very formal, much more formal in layout than what your composition turned to in paintings like Rise of the Duke. It has straight lines, almost Mondrian or Barnett Newman type sensibilities of the length and rigidity of a line, and that idea that there must be lines. Looking back, that formalism juxtaposed against what you can conjure forth seems limiting; would you agree?
GLP: It’s great to get other peoples read on a painting, especially when it is so different than mine!
Headband lends itself well to two-dimensional imagery, since once again I approached it from a printmaking standpoint.
From my perspective, I see Headband as one of my rowdier pieces, barely holding its composition together, and with a face only its mother could love.
The straight lines are mostly string, rope, and ribbon, sometimes just pinned on and hanging down, blowing with every slight breeze.
If ROTD is “clown me” trying to play nice with others, and OBAD is “crafter me” trying to show my chops, then Headband is “train-hopper me” going against the grain.
I can’t think of it as rigid or formal in any way. Sure, it’s an abstract object, but I also see it loosely as the image of a headband containing ones hair and thoughts.
A headband as an article of clothing rather than fashion accessory; it harkens me to bikers, Indians, and Cheech and Chong.
DD: Well, I see your point, and maybe that opening questioning about this painting deserves umbrage rather than your gracious acknowledgement, but I think what made me think of linearity as a theme is just how clean the composition is. If this was a dive off a 10 meter platform, you are getting straight 9s from the judges in composition. Before you, pardon the pun, dove in, how long did you spend just planning each space or zone of the work?
GLP: I almost never plan anything. I don’t start from a sketch or idea even, and I avoid references.
Each painting is my soul on a surface, unadulterated, and on-the-fly in every way.
The Grateful Dead titled their 1990 album Without A Net, because they maintained that that’s exactly how they performed live.
If you are well-trained at your craft, heavily-practiced, in love (maybe even obsessed) with it, and trust yourself, I believe you can be honest and shoot from the hip every single time.
That said, I don’t compartmentalize a thing. After every mark or action is executed on the canvas, I back up as far as possible to take in the image as a whole. It’s physical and fun, and becomes a sort of dancer performance in my studio, with layered sounds as background and motivation. I’m making one image so it’s important for me to work on it that way the whole time.
DD: Talk about the lime green runes in the right side of Headband, those are very successfully done. And that is not an easy color to insert into a painting that otherwise has a broadly white-black-red-concrete palette. In fact, I know of a certain large abstract painting by a major figure in later wave AbEx (which shall remain nameless) that is generally regarded as being weakened if not ruined by the painter’s failed attempt to do precisely what you succeeded in doing here. Where did the idea come from?
GLP: Those lime green, yellow, and golden marks were the last action performed on the surface. I guess I injected them as a final statement to provide pop and unity at the same time.
They keep the eye traveling around the whole composition and that is what’s important to me. Not what they reference, or where they come from, but just as they are, they are operating in a way that makes them useful visually.
DD: The concept of thoughts gathering together like a thick head of hair, and kind of, being arranged for the day, or what you think the day is going to bring, in a headband, is deceptively simple. I thought it was simple, but then I considered it as I look at the painting, and I get sucked in to existential conundrums of thought. Which shapes or colors or vignettes in the painting did you discover while you were bringing this forth that are representative of thoughts that you’ve held?
GLP: Wow. I rarely break down the individual elements of a painting that way and try not to invest much meaning or intelligence into them.
If and when I do it, obstructs my raw use of the material for strictly aesthetic purposes. I cannot consider the origins or connections available to something before or while I’m using it because I may lean towards those biases.
It’s not really about the objects I use, it’s about what I make with those objects. I’m not much for the past life of things as much as I’m interested in what they are doing now and what they may do in the future; turning them into something new.
As a well-rounded, practicing studio artist, I must know the history, origins, and connections to everything I am using and doing. I have invested much time in this, and those studies remain plastered in my mind, so they can spill out through my psyche, or get presented when prompted.
For me, the diamond shape, or harlequin pattern, is a design element from costuming, taking me right back to the female energy of a burlesque show.
Clothes and fabric in general remind me of Shiva and the power of destruction combined with rebirth.
At times the insertion of clothing can conjure up figural elements, but mostly for me they are phantom limbs or simply a reminder that paintings are made by the body.
Turquoise is always New Mexico for me and almost nothing else.
As I began to hang the white ropes drooping from the top, I realized I had done this too many times before when making lacy head dresses, wrapping large stones or people with rope for suspension purposes, and not so directly, creating drapery for my grandmother’s home.
And that blue crown zig-zag at the bottom right corner is my pseudo-signature, resembling a scrawl that I may have performed on a freight train at some point, or it’s a contemporary version of my grandfather’s “X” signature.
DD: Headband is cacophonic within — again I will single it out for a surprising linearity despite its’ box car, broken glass chaos! — itself, almost a compressed cacophony. Do you ever see some ideas about abstraction as extruded — like the egg yolk after it bursts in the pan, and some as compressed, like the egg yolk bubbling at the moment before it bursts. Does that type of energy physics ever intrude into your ideas about form as you paint?
GLP: Wrangling the painting into a point of acceptability is always a goal, but so is keeping just enough agitation, or incompleteness even.
In trying to create something new I’ll shake things up as much as I can, until I have to police myself.
I’m trying to arrive at a vibration between visually and physically acceptable, and disrupting.
This magical endpoint where a composition is “harmonious” or “beautiful” is difficult to explain.
Our human minds and bodies have some consensual idea of what beauty is and we use that to say a piece of art, more fairly, works.
Living on Earth can be chaotic and cacophonous, but we methodically organize it to enable our daily functions. That’s exactly how I paint.
DD: I could argue that Duchamp took an idea that Marx had about material culture in society, and that Rauschenberg took Duchamp’s idea and innovated it to, no, materiality is not art, materiality reveals or unlocks the pent up power of the phenomenon of the aesthetic, and that you are now taking Rauschenberg’s idea and, in a painting like Death Dance, turning the idea a further 90 degrees and saying, no, materiality is not the message, it is just a more brittle, or tinny, or splintered gesso for me to use, and I’ll paint with it alongside oil or acrylic just like a loving family will adopt two kids from different continents and tell them, ‘you’re brothers, don’t focus on the skin tones.’ Or is the physicality of the combine pieces of Death Dance something else, to you?
GLP: I like what you did there, and that is very true.
Everything I use is just raw material and I will use those materials in any way I need to, to make the piece happen.
Yes, I have a strong attachment to my materials, and I even prefer them to come with history, but that only gives you side-story and diversion, not the meaning of what’s going on here. And what is going on here?
Who knows and who cares? I do not invest that kind of energy into the objects I make. These are paintings and not stories. I’m using that phenomenal power of aesthetic communication to make paintings that look good. Writers, critics, conceptualists, dealers, collectors will all inject words and meanings if the work looks good enough.
I am part of a radical new wave of artists who believe that visual communication in this day and age is enough for art to accomplish, and in fact has always been the extent of what it should accomplish.
I also avoid using the words combine, ready-made, or assemblage, because that suggests that each object’s history matters.
No one invests much meaning into the use of acrylic paint or gesso.
DD: Speaking of painting in abstraction, who are you influenced by? Have you studied any careers where the artist is achieving works in abstraction over 10, 20, 30 years, and keeping it vital the whole time?
GLP: Albert Oehlen, Georg Baselitz, Jonathan Lasker, Charline von Heyl, Rebecca Morris, Ed Paschke, Al Held, Terry Winters, Francis Picabia, Frederich Hammersley, Peter Halley, Joan Mitchell, Juane Quick-to-See Smith, and Squeak Carnwath all fit into both questions.
DD: Installed in L.A. as you now are, what is L.A. to you? Has it been long enough to give you an idea as to whether some presence or absence L.A. imposes on its habitues is going to imprint itself onto your work?
GLP: L.A. is the epitome of chaos, with very little wrangling going on; perhaps just enough to function. And that functioning is not at the highest level, and is being agitated on a daily basis.
This makes creation and innovation necessary, but in the quickest and easiest ways. I will be excited to get back to a place that takes itself a bit more seriously, works harder, and is impressed by genuine culture, not habitually attracted to artifice.
And yet, the always eclectic attitude of the city is what brought me here. Here you can almost do anything, and that gives the artist freedom to take ideas to extremes.
The ability to do that is a serious advantage here, combined with the city’s quick and easy vibe. An abundance of destruction and rebirth allows for the filtering through of ideas quickly, and for arriving at something new consistently.
DD: What’s your studio at this time, and is it working for you?
GLP: My studio is a storefront in Mid-City Los Angeles that I share with my wife. We spent most of this past summer building it out, and customizing it to our specifications. We love it!
DD: It’s observable that certain cities that are art friendly are complicated by the design crowd. Cities like Dallas and Atlanta have this reputation, unfairly or fairly. Are you tempted to try your luck in a ‘but it’s really a design town’ type of art city?
GLP: I moved to Dallas at 17 and did some of my best growing up there before moving to Austin. I love cities in general, as well as mountain towns and desert communities. I never discount a place and what it could inspire in me. For the most part, I am attracted to places because of culture, charm, people, and food, and not by a commercial art scene, or a lack-there-of.
DD: For your unique tactile elements, do you go out and shop for them specifically to the project, or are you hoarding years’ worth of strings and pins and scraps of clothing in some crazy bin system?
GLP: The hoarding is closer to the truth. Most, if not all the items on my paintings that are not paint are either collected by me, my friends, and family, or have been gifted to me.
The closer the items are to me, the better I will be at using them.
This means that it is harder to get rid of their history and use them as raw materials, but it also creates entry points for the viewers’ ideas.
DD: Are you reasonably happy with canvasses? Do you feel limited by them? Will you need to do some installations at some point to get an idea out of your head that a canvas can’t hold?
GLP: I am, perhaps, a canvas fetishist. I get nearly turned on by a well-made strainer whether made by me or not.
Even more intimate is the process of stretching a canvas around that strainer. This is where my painting begins, as I sew something on it before stretching it, or spray it with something, or just allow the stretching process to shift or crumble all together. My process is my concept, and it is very specific to painting.
I create boundaries all day, only so I can break them, being the most rebellious person in my studio.
I used to break plenty of rules in real life and now I get those rocks off by painting.
Strangely enough, chaos always needs some form of discipline for it to work.
The canvas becomes my self-imposed limit and my sexy delivery system.
DD: What are you working on right now? A one-off painting? A new series? A 2015 show?
GLP: My work is one long ever-evolving series. I work every day trying to outdo my last painting. Right now I’m just making them smaller, so they can be shipped easily.
DD: Soon Come is perhaps, my favorite painting from your recent work. It incorporates a pair of your pants, what were your pants, your personal trousers (I don’t know any more direct way to say that). Tell us everything you can about this piece!
GLP: Soon Come started as an assemblage, which is how I sorted out the idea of what it would become as a painting. Being the clunky mess that it was at that point, it needed some cleaning up so I trimmed it down to be what it is now.
This is a kitchen sink kind of painting where, before it was finished, it had incorporated into it almost every material and technique I could throw at it.
Sometimes paintings come with just a few moves, and sometimes it takes every move, and sometimes that’s still not enough.
At its peak this thing had attached to it, or leaning against it: blankets, empty paint containers, a hula hoop, an old easel, backpacks, handsaws, cups, plaster chunks, used casts, and lots of clown accessories.
All this stuff was part of the piece, it got so dense it could not be hung. It needed major edits and serious logistical consideration, but I left it alone as a studio shrine for almost a month.
When I returned to it I stripped it down to its essential components, strainer and canvas stretched over it, and continued to paint.
Purging the excess items from the painting allowed me to hang it on the wall, paint it white, and start over, leaving only remnants of its’ former life.
This is how I create a personal narrative or history for my work. To make it look like it’s been though all the things I’ve been through.
My life is riddled with celebratory or party culture. At its’ first incarnation Soon Come harkened to the chaotic aftermath of a real good bash.
In its second coming I wanted it to embody the bash’s vibe, but at its peak point, not at its’ decline.
It had also been through so much physically, so after stripping its excess weight I decided to finish it out with paint only.
“Soon Come” is a Jamaican farewell salute. It means “I will come back soon.”
Gabriel Luis Perez is on the web at www.gabrielluisperez.com.
N.1. this text courtesy of DIADEM Art Papers by Cavendish Projects.
N.2. all text copyright the author and the artist.
N.3. Cavendish Projects is on Twitter and Medium @cavprojects.
