Emilio Perez

Emilio Perez has been a Smart­Stamp AIR col­lab­o­ra­tor since our ear­li­est days. For the artist’s 2022 char­i­ta­ble dona­tion to the Actai Glob­al Foun­da­tion found­ed by Bill Tai, Smart­Stamp mint­ed Perez’s first ever NFTs as well as a phys­i­cal-to-dig­i­tal authen­ti­cat­ed print from his Times Square Mid­night Moments Dream Sea­son video that was pro­ject­ed across all the bill­boards of the world’s most famous square. Most recent­ly, Perez used the Smart­Stamp app to authen­ti­cate all of his paint­ings for his solo show at Fredric Snitzer Gallery in Miami.

Inspired by his per­son­al his­to­ry, life expe­ri­ences and trav­els, Emilio Perez’s paint­ings reveal an inter­est in the nat­ur­al land­scape and a life­long pas­sion for the sea. Medi­at­ed by an urge to emo­tion­al­ly com­pre­hend him­self through “doing,” the artist cre­ates a pic­to­r­i­al impres­sion that is at once nos­tal­gic and hope­ful and always in evo­lu­tion as a vehi­cle to trans­port the view­er on a jour­ney of their own imag­i­na­tion. Influ­enced by the hues and com­po­si­tions of clas­si­cal Renais­sance paint­ings, and sur­re­al­ist uncon­scious automa­tism, Perez’s styl­is­tic hybrid­i­ty plays through in metic­u­lous brush­strokes with ele­ments of abstrac­tion and fig­u­ra­tion, recall­ing mys­ti­cal land­scapes and imag­i­nary worlds.

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 PAMM — Perez Art Muse­um, Mia­mi; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buf­fa­lo; Fun­dación ARCO, Madrid; and Arkansas Art Cen­ter, Lit­tle Rock; as well as many pri­vate and cor­po­rate col­lec­tions, inter­na­tion­al­ly. The artist’s paint­ings were fea­tured in the Crit­i­cal Ges­tures, PAMM, Mia­mi; 12^th Havana Bien­ni­al; Topogra­phies at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buf­fa­lo; and Signs of the Apocalypse/​Rapture at the Hyde Park Art Cen­ter, Chica­go. Perez has 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. Born 1972 in New York. Lives and works in Brooklyn.

Images cour­tesy of the artist.