
Enoc Perez Puerto Rican, 1967
The Mixable One, 2023
Oil on canvas
162.6 x 213.4 cm. (64 x 84 in.)
Copyright The Artist
Further images
Enoc Perez’s The Mixable Ones (2023) offers a seductive meditation on the aesthetics of commercial culture, rendered through a painterly language steeped in atmosphere and nostalgia. Saturated in tones of...
Enoc Perez’s The Mixable Ones (2023) offers a seductive meditation on the aesthetics of commercial culture, rendered through a painterly language steeped in atmosphere and nostalgia. Saturated in tones of amber, saffron, and burnt gold, the composition evokes the intoxicating glow of dappled light refracted through liquid and glass. These chromatic choices do more than suggest material presence – they conjure a mood of sensual excess, recalling the golden age of 1970s liquor advertisements in all their stylised hedonism.
Perez's work has long engaged with the language of desire as mediated through visual culture. In The Mixable Ones, the artist draws from the seductive strategies of advertising – its chromatic richness, its carefully staged glamour while also destabilising their glossy surface. The forms are spectral and imprecise, blurred as though half-remembered or glimpsed through the haze of memory. This dreamlike quality lends the work an ephemeral, almost haunting allure.
Perez does not depict the bottles merely as still life, rather, they are vehicles for a larger inquiry into the nature of contemporary visual consumption. By foregrounding the interplay of light, colour, and surface, the work revels in its own aesthetic beauty. At the same time, it prompts a deeper reflection on the mechanisms through which desire is constructed and commodified.
The Mixable Ones thus operates on two registers: as a luminous celebration of form and as a critique of the visual codes that shape our collective aspirations. Perez challenges viewers to consider the ways in which commercial imagery infiltrates our understanding of beauty, value, and identity. The result is a work that is as visually arresting as it is conceptually layered, creating an image that shimmers with both surface allure and critical depth.
Perez's work has long engaged with the language of desire as mediated through visual culture. In The Mixable Ones, the artist draws from the seductive strategies of advertising – its chromatic richness, its carefully staged glamour while also destabilising their glossy surface. The forms are spectral and imprecise, blurred as though half-remembered or glimpsed through the haze of memory. This dreamlike quality lends the work an ephemeral, almost haunting allure.
Perez does not depict the bottles merely as still life, rather, they are vehicles for a larger inquiry into the nature of contemporary visual consumption. By foregrounding the interplay of light, colour, and surface, the work revels in its own aesthetic beauty. At the same time, it prompts a deeper reflection on the mechanisms through which desire is constructed and commodified.
The Mixable Ones thus operates on two registers: as a luminous celebration of form and as a critique of the visual codes that shape our collective aspirations. Perez challenges viewers to consider the ways in which commercial imagery infiltrates our understanding of beauty, value, and identity. The result is a work that is as visually arresting as it is conceptually layered, creating an image that shimmers with both surface allure and critical depth.