Casa Malaparte

7 June - 26 October 2008


With this exhibition the Maramotti Collection inaugurates a space dedicated to artworks made by young artists. Guest artists create and display works which would then become part of the collection.
Thus a project takes shape merging together practices of acquisition and expansion of painting production with those properly pertaining to the concept of sharing and displaying.
Pattern room, as the space is called, is located in the area where – when the building was a manufacturing plant – models and prototypes were made.
The project scope and experimentation have been – and still are - common features in this place, from the past till the present day.

Casa Malaparte, the project by Enoc Perez for the Maramotti Collection, is composed of two large wall oil paintings: Casa Malaparte (Day) and Casa Malaparte (Night).
The painting subject is a true icon of Italy’s Modernist architecture. The house, designed and built in Capri in the late thirties by Curzio Malaparte, was intensely “cut to his own size” by the writer who called it the “house like myself”.
The project intends pursuing the research initiated by the Puerto Rican artist in the mid Nineties, on architectures from 1920’s/1950’s, and how they were popularly transfigured in social forms/metaphors of power, fascination, beauty in a time when the future seemed quite promising. His paintings also evoke the disenchantment with a vanished dream and the “purely mental reality” 0f images.
The exhibition also shows figures Perez extrapolates from the filmic or photographic social realm in order to “act painting”, thus questioning the role played by painting and its capacity for renewal.

Enoc Perez’s painting is the result of a complex process. The colour transfer on the canvas is made without brushes, by starting from a series of hand-drawn sketches on paper: one sketch for each colour used by the artist in the painting. Then, the artist applies a layer of colour on the back of the paper sheet, the colour to be later transferred on the back of the canvas through line tracing. The process is similar to mono-print, a mechanical printing process, enriched by a complex hand process applied for the creation of the art piece. Rich images develop gradually in multiple layers, creating rough and abraded effects on the surface, which - although maintaining a rich colour texture - acquire a strongly evocative trait emphasizing a sort of “nostalgic” approach to the material.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue with text written by Mario Diacono.

Enoc Perez was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico in 1967. At present he lives and works in New York. In 2007 an important personal exhibition was organized at the MCA in Miami. Personal exhibitions have been organized in New York, Boston, Los Angeles, London and Paris. In 1996 he participated in the V Bienal Internacional de Pintura at Cuenca, and in 1995, in Quinta Bienal de la Habana.

Press-clipping selection

S. Luppi, Arte e Malaparte, in "Il Giornale dell'Arte", n. 277, Jun. 2008