By Pérez Celis - Museo Virtual
Fundación Pérez Celis
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
Pérez Celis painting is a kind of mirror of time, where the reflections of metaphysical depth are harmonized in palpable music. Master of contingencies, mystics of the cosmos, the painter's paintbrush is endowed with a power to unite the spatial to the temporal, and leaves us the impression that each of his artistic revelations comes to us through a river of celestial lavas. The materiality melts in the grey dawn of magnetism, ennobled by the flames of the universal soul. We are witnessing a new alchemy of silence. Ratimir Pavlovic 1980
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
After the hours of work with which he is happy every day, he takes advantage of his free time to enjoy the many temptations offered by Paris, without haste or useless excesses: exhibitions, concerts, museums that he likes to visit gradually, that is, limited to one artist at a time: Goya, Turner and Rembrandt today.
Gaston Diehl:Time and its ruptures
Elevar el pensamiento (1979) by Pérez CelisPérez Celis - Museo Virtual
Therefore, how can we be surprised that in the midst of this restlessness, which is nevertheless fruitful and advantageous to him, another process of rupture is to be unleashed, which is soon to be accelerated? There is a change in his work in which the incisive, violent rhythms, the alternation of cut planes will be replaced little by little by a strange movement that is extended until solved in a zigzag ascent in steps or stairs. Within a melodic gush of colors, that emergence of another kind rises upwards, imposing its haughty, strict forms, which are linked to each other. We are bordering on a poetic image reminiscent of sovereign cadences of the giant steps that climb rapidly into the sky.
That unusual spectacle does not fail to refer to the no less impressive of the countless and endless steps of Machu Picchu or the pyramids of Teotihuacan.
Gaston Diehl:Time and its ruptures
De los espacios encontrados (1980) by Pérez CelisPérez Celis - Museo Virtual
These ethereal visions that last one day and what we might call sometimes, according to the titles of some pictures “fugitive evocations of sacred places” vanish to give way to new dismemberments in monstrous blocks, fragments burning in the midst of Darkness that darkens. His painting always rejects any descriptive temptation as well as any theoretical or intellectual experimentation, leaving to each one the freedom to imagine, as it seems to him, the sense of the dispositions of form and colors that he has made. It would be useless then, after a break like this, so normal in him, to try to give an interpretation of the cycle that begins. Is not everyone free to see the threat of a cataclysm, a destruction, an eruption, or just an energy explosion, a space takeoff, a flight over time, one of the many enigmas of our time?
Gaston Diehl:Time and its ruptures
Rainier III Prince of Monaco prince Albert, Iris and Pérez Celis
Missing public work
Missing public work
Missing public work
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