Perico Berlin

Ray Smith works alternately in New York and Mexico. This combination of places is symptomatic of Smith’s cultural bilingualism. He makes use of the lively Mexican legacy of great wall painters like Diego Rivera, as well as European artists such as Picasso and Fernand Léger. From this cultural heritage, Smith transposes themes and everyday or politically charged motifs to an original, powerful visual idiom.

The monumental four-part panel Perico Berlin by Ray Smith shows a hallucinatory depiction of an enlarged blue head and a lion battling over prey. The story goes that the fall of the Berlin wall inspired Smith to depict the head of the former president Gorbachev, but that during the painting process this portrait turned into Morales, a well-known Mexican freedom fighter. On the head, he painted the white hat of Bolívar, a Venezuelan general who chased the Spaniards out of a large part of South America in the early nineteenth century. Smith works alternately in New York and Mexico. He makes use of the lively Mexican heritage of great muralists, such as Diego Rivera.