New York The beginnings

Paris with its forms and its gray color is still present in his work. He paints for the exhibition at Schweyer Galdo Gallery. Midday he keeps his routine as in Paris but museums are far, Green Farms is a place in Connecticut two hours from New York ,the museums are for the weekend. Perusing the great library of the house, one day between the books of the library he discovers Modern Hispanic America of Frederick S. Richard, the cover is one of his silkscreens, a work from the seventies, whose impression had been lost of sight. It's a good omen, the exhibition at Schweyer Galdo is sold out entirely, the second time in his life but not the last. The Pérez decide in favor of the New Land.

In 1983 Pérez Celis moves to New York. He finds Paris too connected with the past, fixed upon the final sparkles of a modernity that has become static and paralyzing. Instead, the American metropolis boils with an incomparable energy and brings him closer to the loved America that has always been the source of his greatest inspiration. To Celis, the future is in this territory that goes from Canada to Tierra del Fuego, and he doesn’t get tired of repeating it in every single interview throughout those years. Rodrigo Alonso Without net .

The move barely changes his rhythm of work. He still creates with a feverish impulse and an admirable perseverance. This activity doesn’t stop him from taking care of the circulation of his work that travels ceaselessly all around the American continent. The same year of the move, he exhibits in Schweyer Galdo Gallery of Birmingham (USA), Jacques Martínez of Buenos Aires and Camino Brent of Lima. The following year he exhibits in Castagnino Museum of Rosario and the Centro Lincoln of Buenos Aires and in 1985 he exhibits in Miami, New Jersey, Lima, Paris, Buenos Aires and Bogotá, finishing the tour with a successful retrospective in the Centro Cultural de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires (nowadays Centro Cultural Recoleta). Rodrigo Alonso Without net .

All this movement has an inevitable impact on his work. The agitated cultural life of the Great Apple, its architecture, spaces, velocity, builds a very different environment to the European. Though, the main transformation in his work is not perceived in themes or forms sometimes present –some chromatisms, its expressiveness, the increasingly monumental formats - it is an emotional transformation. At this point of his career, Pérez Celis feels so confident about his work that he takes it as a real challenge, as a leap in the dark, with the certainty of finding the right way during the process of creation itself and not in the planning or the sketching. To some extent, the arrival in New York coincides with the discovery of his greatest creative freedom. Rodrigo Alonso Without net .

In any way, formal transformations are evident. The American critic Peter Frank describes the first mutations with the following words:

“In this first set of paintings that Celis has produced since he settled in New York, the vibrant inflections of the metropolis can be seen in clear and surprising balances, different from the rhythmic and monumental formalism that characterized his work during the last decade. This inflection is embodied in an enlargement of its textual contrasts and color, contrasts that reach a rare dramatic extreme, even in its ponderous formal language. Rodrigo Alonso Without net .

Beyond the variegation of brushstrokes and thundering arrows of flashing colors, the basic formal premise that remains is the confrontation of the main planes, usually two or three in each work. Some planes penetrate the others or are in turn penetrated by other plastic incidents. Other planes appear to invade each other in overwhelming demolishing waves. Other glide along like tectonic plates beneath the surface of the earth. In these latter cases especially, the material violence of the pasted oil or the graphite used gives evidence of the cataclysm… The previous paintings showed the planes in their mutual war, but not the energy flashes that sparkle from their shocks. Now, however, the tongues of fire and space collapses play within the motion of the planes. Settling in New York, it is clear that Celis has incorporated the hard profile of Gotham and New York art into the elegant portentousness of his art. ” (2). Rodrigo Alonso Without red

The context has a confusing interpretation of these works. Because in the middle of the triumphal enthusiasm of Italian Transavantgarde and neo-expresionists, the interpretations of his paintings lead to rushed and mislead conclusions. In May 1987, while he has a solo exhibition in New York (3), Marian Goodman Gallery exhibits Anselm Kiefer works and Sperone Westwater Gallery presents an individual show of Sandro Chia (4) . On the occasion of his second solo show in that city, the critic Anselmo Conde calls Celis the “Latin abstract neo-expresionist” . But that’s not the road chosen by the Argentinian artist, who permanently evades any stylistic classification. That’s how Rafael Squirru also understands it: "As it happens in the famous action-paintings, each work is a place where the existential anguishes and their answers. But Pérez Celis, who’s different from the American artists, even though he healthily registers his stay in New York, he keeps structures that talk to us about his fidelity to our American conscience (6) ". Rodrigo Alonso Without net .

New York 1st Oct. 1987

After an academic start at the School of Fine Arts in Buenos Aires, the most European city in Latin America, the destiny led me to travel through the South American continent, first arriving in Bolivia crossing Lake Titicaca to Peru, getting to know Cuzco and Machu Picchu, where I reencountered images that the critique in Argentina was beginning to point out in my work, as an art with American Indigene roots. The images of our continent, incorporating the horizontal Pampa, the landscape by excellence Patagonian, adding to the different contemporary influences that came from Europe and North America, were the characteristics that accompanied my work during several years. Later installed in Paris for 6 years to realize my european experience I worked and exhibited until I felt that in Europe one could learn a lot, but undoubtedly was the past unlike America where from Patagonia to the Canada energy belongs to present time and looks to the future. All this energy has the vital center in New York, where I have been living for the last four years, continuing my pilgrimage across the continent. I believe that the American Earth emits the creative energy of our time. I feel the painting as expansions of own and universal consciences, visual manifestations of transmutation of energy througout the internal processes, of which we are not aware, until we visualize the consummate work. Pérez Celis

In fact, one of the most evident notes of Pérez Celis pictorial production since he arrived to New York is the velocity with which his interests, themes and plastic approximations change. The freedom finally found in this city lets him change all the time without having to renounce to himself. Thus, the temperamental dynamism at the beginnings of the eighties leads without conflicts to the quiet of paintings that explore the solid existence of certain symbols as the I-Ching hexagrams (Sereno-abismal, La gracia, Luminoso receptivo¸1989 entre otras) or the religious symbols ( the David Star and The cross in La razón de Occidente, 1990). Rodrigo Alonso Without red .