One World Trade Center gets star treatment in Enoc Perez’s recent paintings: Perez created his compositions by laying oil stick drawings face down onto silver-leafed canvas to imprint the gritty pigment, and seen from below, the building repeats and stutters like a misregistered reproduction. The effect recalls Andy Warhol’s Double Elvis, and like that icon of celebrity, Perez seems to want to make our newest landmark into an object of veneration.
But Perez is also conjuring memory and history: One World Trade Center’s echoing image often evokes the Twin Towers. He relegates the new structure’s optimistic reflectiveness to the background, leaving the edifice itself matte and crusted. In some panels, tarry black dominates, leaving the impression of something burnt and ravaged. In more colorful versions, Crayola blues, greens and yellows appear sickly instead of exuberant. In Perez’s hands, the august presence of the subject comes off as jittery and moody—a vision of the shiny present haunted by the past.