Text Roger Bouillot

Half a day in the afternoon, 18 months ago, I was grumbling against a new tenant of the building which monopolized the elevator: I decided to go down on feet my five floors, just to find myself in the middle of four or five very large format paintings, of an outstanding presence and beauty.Forgetting my contrariety, I went to my new neighbor asking him if he was the author of those works, with his affirmative answer I concluded: "Delighted to meet you," I am art critic, I would like to meet again. The next day we ate together and from that moment I am the privileged witness of the considerable evolution of my friend Pérez Celis. The works of Pérez Celis have been a great discovery for me. Man too, because it is rare to find an artist to make his creation so intimately body. In a few weeks, looking at his paintings brought from Argentina, the engravings and drawings, I learned to know a continent on which the amount of readings, films, exhibitions and music had not given me a limited approach. Without representing the invisible, Pérez Celis' painting symbolizes and fundamentally sums up, essentially, the deepest reality of Latin America, the immensity of the Pampa, with the limitlessness of its skies, the fervor of its cultures, and the projection of the future world, that cannot be created elsewhere than in these new lands, where so many immemorial roots were reborn harmoniously. Of its Parisian windows, Pérez Celis contemplates the Seine et L'Ile de la Cité, the old Lutèce, prima form-twenty centuries ago-of what will become Paris. It is there where Notre-Dame has been built, on the site of a pagan sanctuary, where the first university was born and the first kings of France lived until the end of the Middle Ages.