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Jenny Perez has created a style which reflects the energy of street art while illustrating her admiration for formal abstraction. The imagery found in her most recent body of work represents the shadows of her past, and the whispers of her forward journey, as she commands it. The titles of her paintings lend even more dimension as simple observations, poetic markers, and almost indicators of change.
A strongly driven Caribbean-American artist, from the Dominican Republic, Jenny paints with a zest for exploration, relentlessly reworking and editing, with an inexhaustible preoccupation with the idea of process as a focal point. Her beginnings as a painter centered around her daily observations of Miami’s golden age of street art in the early 2000s. Being heavily influenced by this burgeoning scene along with friendships established with key street artists, Jenny has taken her learned skills and carried them into the formal studio setting, creating a stylized, electric and experimental language all her own.
Jenny’s current body of work explores tints and shades of rich color brushed onto biomorphic shaped canvases. Therein lies the contrast: in the pushing and pulling, breaking and putting back together, she creates volumes of spatial perception encompassing a composition in motion. There is movement and still points on which to rest in her work, which commingle to voice her vision of what was, what is, and what she desires to come.
Her inspiration behind the collection initiated with the shape of the canvas itself as she had custom made the sculptural forms that hark back to those of Victorian aristocratic portraits. There are even hints of the rich, dark palettes used to paint the refined, composed and dignified, noble men and women of those years privileged enough to be immortalized on canvas.
At the same time, her paintings are a love note to her own heritage, celebrating women of color in their own right and royalty. She bestows upon each of her paintings a tender abstraction to render them universal, both in time and space.
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My work celebrates brown women, exposing our vulnerabilities and power through portraiture. Before I ever had a studio practice, I began as a street artist, working with materials such as spray paint, charcoal and oil sticks, painting on walls and on scraps of cardboard and wood.
I continue to carry this spirit into my studio practice by continuing to explore and work with these materials. I also work in acrylic, mainly because I like to paint quickly, I want the work to dry quickly, I want the gesture that inspires me to remain fresh in the work.
My use of the biomorphic-shaped canvas implies a “less-than-perfect but beautiful” stance on how beauty is defined and derives from our connection to nature.
There is a sense of translucence in some of the paintings while others can feel quite dense. I love the use of dark undertones marked by a source of light penetrating the space, and am motivated to interject color and energy derived from my Afro-Caribbean background and visual culture into these areas of darkness.
The women I paint are ultimately reflections and fragments of me, creating connections to the untold stories of women from another time, of other women like me.
