Text Roger Bouillot

Let’s leave History to dedicate ourselves to our time and to a great page of the History of Art, I want to talk about the School of Paris. Without being formal, the School of Paris has always existed; the French capital continues to draw artists of the entire world, like an El Dorado of the spirit. That’s how it works with Pérez Celis, who confessed to me, just a couple of weeks after his arrival, how important this Paris period seemed to him. I was a witness of it, everything started with the ardent investigation about the use of gold and silver. It was a creative frenzy that lasted several months during which many strongly new works were born, like a logical continuation of precedent paintings that lacked, from my point of view, the elevation to a superior level, in the spiritual and pictorial quality field. Always sliding planes interposing in parallel detachments, folds, fractures, spirals of Time, static or breaking spaces. Always such a rigorous grammar of forms and the games of symbols so specific of Pérez Celis’ art. But his paintings are more than mad cavalcades of clouds and mirages, vertiginous horizons, fury of the elements jolting the immobile time, the labyrinths of love and trust in eternity. Using gold or silver as an ancient blacksmith, transmuting the vile matter as an alchemist, Pérez Celis has now managed to reach a superior level where art is a mysterious poetic and prophetic conjugation. At that point where painting allows us to touch a metaphysical order with the finger, where words cannot say what they let us glimpse. Paris, 2.17.1980. Roger Bouillot