“The Everglades is a test. If we pass it, we may get to keep the planet.”
Marjory Stoneman Douglas
On the evolution of American landscape painting, Jose Felix Perez is perhaps best defined as the Charles Burchfield of the swamp. A Miami native, Jose attended New World School of the Arts where he readily embraced romantic landscape painting to depict the threatened wilderness of our tropical home, in all of its wild, colorful vibrancy. He follows the legendary Highwaymen and Backus with his distinctive renditions of our most precious resource. Spaces between colors and rhythm of shapes are interwoven with a hypnotic tranquility of our alluring and seemingly endless natural environment. Perez deftly blends a palette of prismatic colored brilliance to create enduring compositions more akin to Jackson Pollack than Clyde Butcher. During the magic hour, that perfect time photographers and painters embrace, everything seems bathed in perfect, crisp light. But it's elusive and fragile, just like the tropical nature that surrounds us, threatened from every side. With his unique vision of our beloved river of grass, we are privileged to witness nature at its best, be it within our backyards or deep in a cypress hammock. For his first solo show at Swampspace, Jose Felix Perez offers recent works for your allegorical mythic experience.
