Photo Credit: Natalie Ivis
In her monumental works on paper, Alina Perez (b. 1995; Miami, Florida) blends personal recollection and imagination, combining both remembered and fantastical elements that create a realm entirely her own. Perez employs the mind’s eye, using drawing as a tool to visualize scenes that are motivated by real emotional sensations. The artist understands memory as inherently malleable and open to chance, and uses her practice as a force in the constant revision of her own memories. Working in grand, fluid narrative, Perez rethinks familial history, personal trauma, and notions of identity that are rooted in both the individual and in geography.
The artist consistently returns to a lexicon of symbols and environments that pull heavily from her lived experiences as a Cuban-American raised in Miami, Florida. These elements eschew straightforward notions of storytelling and narrative, instead favoring uncertain and evocative interplays of subject and setting. The artist likens the delicate balance of Florida’s ecology to that of young peoples’ inner worlds, and mines a kinship between the dense life of the region’s tropical wetlands and the depth of human experience. In Perez’s work, animals and plants act as manifestations of an environment that teems with life of its own, casting the natural realm as a shapeshifting player alongside its human inhabitants. The artist locates herself as the conduit for this lush world, a role in which she channels emotional states with energy on the elemental level of earthly phenomena.
Each of Perez’s drawings is built up from base layers of instinctive gesture which she constantly revises, refining and complicating her works to bring their details into focus. Working intuitively on paper with pastel and charcoal, the artist builds scenes that play out in an ever-evolving space that operates with its own surreal logic and acts as a living player unto itself. Fascinated by the capacity drawing has for capturing emotion through mark-making and the physical memory of her medium, Perez uses this quality to create a material intensity that mirrors its disposition. The fragility and flexibility of dry media make a constant record of changes in speed, stillness, and focus, and Perez uses these qualities to unearth emotional modes and make them tangible. Perez’s drawings reference compositional ideas from canonical works of the Renaissance and Baroque periods to consider acute psychological dualities: violence and healing, sensuality and pain, vulnerability and strength.
Alina Perez’s work has been exhibited at the Taubman Museum of Art, Roanoke, VA; Atlanta Contemporary, GA; Arcadia Missa Gallery & Publishers, London, UK; James Cohan Gallery, New York, NY; Rachel Uffner, New York, NY; Company Gallery, New York, NY; and M+B, Los Angeles, CA. Work by Perez is included in “Flow States – LA TRIENAL 2024,” the second edition of El Museo del Barrio’s triennial surveying Latinx contemporary art. In 2017, Perez was a resident at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Madison, ME, and has attended residencies at the Fine Arts Works Center in Provincetown, MA, the Ox-Bow School of Art, Saugatuck, MI; and the Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, VT. Alina Perez received her BFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design and her MFA in Painting and Printmaking from the Yale School of Art. The artist lives and works in New York, NY. Perez’s first solo exhibition with Yossi Milo will open in January of 2025.