Paris 1979 -1983

I feel that the close influence of the works of great painters of all time, the permanent visits to museums of Europe, aroused in me a kind of interest perceived in greater freedom and ease in creation.

Pérez Celis Paris 1982

Gaston Diehl:Time and its ruptures

A formidable destiny was in charge of crossing our destinies. So, since 1979 I had the chance of meeting with him in his Parisian studio where he had the luck to be in front of “L’Ile de la Cité” and the smooth Sena. I think that the gentle and favorable atmosphere made him give up little by little the profound impressions he got from Venezuela. The noise and turmoil of Caracas with its paradoxical traffic jams but also its tremendous dynamism, the easiness to adjust to any modernism, its frenetic music where all the different folklores are mixed, such vitality, wouldn’t have taken him to adopt in his paintings the principle of those intermittent, syncopated constructions, where the multiplication of acute angles, lighted and shadowed parts denote, however, certain restless tension? Those tendencies, almost aggressive, point out, very purposefully, the problems posed by the fragmented, atomized time that corresponds to the contemporary world.

A similar awareness is logical in him since he has always respected the relief that can arouse a natural restlessness. He wants to be a man both passionate and insatiable and never tries to haggle for effort or work. As he himself comments with much grace, he tries on his own to bring together what is claimed to be irreconcilable, to combine in his creation passion and reason that many tend to oppose. In fact, that vigorous intuitive impetus which manifests itself and which so often leads him to confront himself with immensities, never neglects him or leaves him at random, but watches him, untiring, subjecting him to deep questions, to a constant and methodical work that nothing comes to hinder, not even his trips to Argentina. However, such assiduity that resembles that of a craftsman does not prevent him from accumulating the various contributions that come before him and with much modesty he pretends to be like "a sponge that must be willing to absorb everything that surrounds it".

Gaston Diehl:Time and its ruptures

One day at noon, 18 months ago, I was grumbling against a new tenant of the building who monopolized the elevator. I decided to go downstairs by foot and found myself in the middle of four or five large paintings that had such a presence and an extraordinary beauty.

Forgetting my annoyance, I asked my new neighbor if he was the painter of those works; with his affirmative response I concluded: “Nice to meet you, I am an art critic, I’d like to see you again.”

The following day we ate together and from that moment on I am a privileged witness of the considerable evolution of mi friend Pérez Celis.

Pérez Celis’ work has been a great discovery for me. The man as well, since it’s uncommon to find an artist so embodied with his creation. In a few weeks, looking at the paintings he brought from Argentina, engravings and drawings, I learned to know a continent that quantity of books, movies, expositions and music had given me a limited approach.

Without depicting the invisible, Pérez Celis’ paintings fundamentally, essentially symbolize and resume Latin America’s most profound reality, Pampa’s immensity, with the vastness of its skies, the fervor of its cultures, and the projection of the future world which will be only created in these new lands where so many immemorial roots are reborn harmoniously. Through his windows, Pérez Celis contemplates The Sena and L’Ile de la Cité, the old Lutèce and the first forms –two hundred years ago- of what Paris would become. The place where Notre-Dame was built, over the foundation of a pagan sanctuary, where the first university was born and the first French kings lived till the end of the Middle Ages.

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

Gaston Diehl: A call to the spiritual

For not having deviated from his already long career - his first exhibition, at age 17 was in 1956 - Pérez Celis is almost considered as an exception, here and even more in Argentina. Such fidelity to himself, to his goals, tends to disappear nowadays when sometimes it’s almost an obligation to follow someone else’s various changes of direction. But it is necessary to point out at once that it is not only the project adopted from the beginning to dedicate itself to expressing the mythical face of that continent that travels in all its senses, because in this respect there is a legion of artists who pretend to do so although, unfortunately, most conform to some anecdotal or allegorical figures transposed from folklore.

… The fact that Perez Celis has achieved to unite with so much truth in his work the brilliance of the colors, the exaltation of the brushstrokes, buds with such touching resonances, is a clear proof of that thirst for spirituality that has always encouraged him. The anxious speculations about space and time correspond to his will to overcome and transcend. It is necessary to recognize that such position is infrequent since the invitation to evade, to incite meditation constitute in themselves a great responsibility to assume and few contemporary artists accept it. However, for him, as he often says "in a time so agitated and threatened everywhere, painting must be a means of communication as any other, that helps men to endure adversities and have even more hope".

Gaston Diehl: A call to the spiritual

His ambition is situated from the beginning in the higher level, it aspires to the universality of a language. If for some time, he also used the signs that are usually intended to interpret the American world: vertigo of infinity, permanence of the sacred, immensity of La pampa, adoration of the stars, images of the typical bestiary, etc… he hurries to reduce them to sibylline structures. Beyond the signs, he is more concerned with his own concept: the spiritual exhortation that he tries to express in his work, above all, by the pre-eminence of the light he places with skillful and specific stratagems so that it shines, invading the evoked scene, giving it another meaning, a superior scope.

Gaston Diehl: A call to the spiritual

The language of painting is more universal than that of words, we agree, therefore, in front of Pérez Celis’ paintings –Argentinian painter that worked in Caracas and then in Paris, adding a name to the group of Paris School -, we decided, facing these paintings to acknowledge some of the characteristics of the painting that is practiced today in every part of the world. But careful: we don’t have to rush and talk about that universality of “modern painting”. The first most basic principle, the one we never have to forget despite appearances is that art is the different thing.

Jean Cassou

They express in a decisive way a different intent from the solution of technical and formal problems. Of course, this painter appeared in a determined time of history of painting. But this chronological fact is not enough to situate him. He wanted to express something very particular and the one thing that encouraged him to set out that questioning was not a date coincidence but his most secret counselor, Latin America. A questioning that prevails like that of the first man in the first garden, the first man in front of the elements, immensity, nature.

Jean Cassou