Enoc came up with a painting process as if he'd plugged into an early moog synthesizer. It straddled the line between abstraction and representation. A kind of up side down tight rope walker. Making him an artist who feeds the hand that shakes him.

— Richard Prince

Reflex Amsterdam is pleased to present Selected Drawings & Paintings, an exhibition bringing together works by Enoc Perez that move through memory, modernism, desire and the unstable space between abstraction and representation.

“I’m just trying to steal a time that preceded me,” Perez has said. “A moment when everything was new to me and when possibility was realistic.”

That sense of reaching towards something just out of reach runs throughout the exhibition. Perez’s paintings draw from the visual language of modernism, architecture and popular imagery, yet his subjects are never simply descriptions of what they depict. They become carriers of memory; personal, collective and imagined.

The hotels of Puerto Rico, in particular, return as places suspended between lived experience and projection. At once familiar and distant, they evoke a world shaped by childhood, longing and possibility. Elsewhere, bottles, advertisements and fragments of visual culture enter the work with the same shifting quality: images that feel remembered as much as observed.

Alongside the paintings, the drawings offer a more immediate register. For Perez, they are a place of discovery, where images can emerge quickly and instinctively. As he puts it, drawing is where he goes “to figure out what to do next” , a space in which thought and gesture remain inseparable.

Together, the works in Selected Paintings & Drawings move between the personal and the collective, the seductive and the melancholic, the remembered and the imagined. Rather than looking back towards a fixed past, Perez creates images that remain in motion, images shaped by the desire to hold on to something that may never have fully existed in the first place.