Tamen Pérez

Lives and works in New York, NY

Artist statement

My paintings produce a palimpsest accumulated on repurposed textiles–such as former bedsheets, aprons, or even painted surfaces–stretched on wooden frames. These materials connect my studio practice to larger networks of industrial production as well as records of bodily intimacy. To produce further dissonance between material surfaces and the legibility of the images painted on top of them, I collage pieces from the same fabric stretched around the frames onto the picture plane to exaggerate texture, contradicting the smoothness of the painted images with bumps and irregularities. My work aims to explore the mysteries of time and nature through an excess of mimesis that engages formally and conceptually with the ideas and materials that comprise it. Painting images framed by my experience growing up in Costa Rica, I think about crises, such as extinction (Incilius Periglenes and La superposición y el entrelazamiento) and the riddled colonial past that informs my own sense of history (¿Si sabrá más el discípulo? and Expansión). My biographical experience of the natural world has led me to question the conventions of painting that I have learned, including the false neutrality established by technologies of image-making and reproduction. In these ways, I insert myself into the artworks rather than perpetuate the legacy of western landscape painting, one that teaches us to see the world as inert matter that remains separate from individuated perspectives.

Artwork