Emilio Perez

Music and rhythm have always been part of my process, but I can’t say I have a go-to song. Instead, the congas are there as a tool to help me clear my mind and think, as much as they are there to have fun playing along to music and occasionally annoying my neighbours. I often play them when I step back to look at a painting and contemplate the next thing I’m going to do. The rhythmic patterns help me focus.

Having spent most of my life living on or near the ocean, it has always been a source of inspiration and escape. The beauty of surfing is that you have no choice but to be present. You are constantly adjusting to your surroundings, and everything is always moving. When you’re riding a wave, you’re reacting intuitively to what the ocean sends your way. It’s a unique moment in time that can never be repeated just like a brushstroke.
My favourite place to surf is pretty much anywhere there are waves and the water is warm, and of those places Puerto Rico has always been one of my favourites. I’ve been going down there for years, and since 2020 I’ve kept a small studio where I spend part of the winter painting.

My one ritual is showing up. I never know when inspiration is going to come, so I just try to make sure I’m in the studio when it happens. I typically go to the studio every day and spend the first half of the day on emails and to-do lists, but I rarely start painting before early afternoon.

Even with my early abstract work, nature has always been the most important source of inspiration. Although my paintings aren’t specifically about the Caribbean, they share a sensibility, and I certainly draw inspiration from there. Having lived in Rio as a child and growing up in Miami, I’ve always been connected to tropical landscapes.
The times I’ve been in Cuba, I’ve felt a deep spiritual connection, which I attribute to my personal and family history. In Puerto Rico, I feel a similar connection but more rooted in the landscape and nature itself, which helps me tap into a certain energy, one that comes through especially in the work I make while I’m there.

My studios in Brooklyn and Puerto Rico could not be more different. Despite drawing from the imagination to create my work, I do notice subtle differences in the paintings depending on where they’re made. The experience of painting in shorts and flip-flops after a swim, with the sound of palms swaying in the breeze, is a far cry from the sirens and garbage trucks in Brooklyn.
In the city, I’m working from memory and sensation, things that linger. In the Caribbean, everything is immediate. Making art has always been an escape for me, so I’m never painting a literal view of my surroundings, no matter where I am. I’m painting how experiences, places, and even sounds and smells feel in my body, and filtering them through my imagination.

My first trip to Cuba was in 2000, to work on a research project about the history of performance art in the 1980s, and all of my subsequent trips were also for art-related projects. Before that first visit, Cuba only existed in my imagination and in the stories of others. It was important for me to go so I could begin building my own relationship with a place that has influenced so much of my identity.
Cuba carries a different weight for me. It’s familiar, but there’s an emotional gravity. I feel both connected and slightly undone. It’s powerful and feels like I’m reconnecting with a part of myself that existed before I did.

I actually started making this work in the early 2000s, and it has always been about intuition, spontaneity, and flow. I’ve described it as a conversation between the purity and expressiveness of a brushstroke and the immediacy of mark-making. Because the process is reductive, cutting into the surface and peeling away the top layer of paint to expose the background, it allows me to be as loose and expressive as I wanted with the initial application of paint, knowing I could always pull an image out of the chaos.
By intuitively reacting to the brushstrokes, I allow the painting to serve as a roadmap for the drawing. What’s going through my mind is actually very little. It’s like a long drive: you leave home and arrive at your destination with little recollection of what happened in between. It’s pure flow.

My work has always evolved organically. I often feel like I’m just a vehicle channelling a creative energy with little say in the matter, I’m simply using my sensibilities and experiences to steer the ship as best I can. The new landscapes are really a return to my earliest influences: nature and my love of classical painting.
Although I had never made work like this before, I wanted to challenge myself to do something new. I had never made anything even remotely representational and felt it was time to switch things up. But the goal in both bodies of work hasn’t changed: I’m interested in making paintings that inspire the viewer’s imagination and reveal themselves over time.

The titles usually come at the very end, once the painting has had time to reveal what it wants to be. I’ve always felt that the work carries its own sense of time, moments stretching, collapsing, or looping back, the way memories and dreams do. That’s usually what I’m responding to.
I try to keep the titles vague and mysterious, not to hide anything, but to leave enough space for the viewer to create their own meaning. For me, they’re markers of a feeling rather than statements: something that acknowledges the passage of time, or the way we drift in and out of it, without closing the door on interpretation.

Throughout my entire career, I’ve always wanted to connect with a broad audience and have tried to avoid categorising my work in terms of specific themes or places. People have a tendency to label things, and while I would never ignore my Cuban roots, I’m the sum of many parts and experiences that go far beyond cultural identity. I like to meet people where they are, so no matter where I show my work, audiences can find their own way to connect.

I recognise now, after many years, how much my experience as a first-generation Cuban-American contributed to my path as an artist. When I was a teenager, I felt caught between two worlds, never feeling fully Cuban or fully American, and although I didn’t realise it at the time, I was searching for an identity I could call my own.
It turns out the identity I was looking for found me through art. Through becoming an artist, I was able to understand my personal history and connect with people all over the world. I’m very proud of my Cuban heritage because it has informed so much of who I am, but I’m not a big fan of labels. In my opinion, labelling someone based on place, cultural background, or religion gives a very narrow view of a much bigger and more complex picture.