Esteban Ramón Pérez: Smoking Mirror

Charles Moffett is pleased to present Smoking Mirror, an exhibition of new works by Los Angeles-based multidisciplinary artist Esteban Ramón Pérez. This marks Pérez’s inaugural solo exhibition with Charles Moffett and builds upon several past presentations of the artist’s work at the gallery, including the two-artist and group exhibitions Longest Way Round (2025), Genius Loci (2023), and Sobre Las Olas (2022). Pérez's practice involves a process of self-excavation, engaging with themes of hybridity, materiality, and the interplay between visibility and obscurity. Bringing together eleven new mixed-media paintings and two sculptures, the exhibition showcases the artist’s signature skill and ambitious material experimentation to create dynamic, multilayered compositions that hover between the earthly and imagined.

Born in Los Angeles and raised in the Inland Empire, Pérez draws upon his upbringing to inspire his practice. He examines his subjectivity in relation to familial histories of migration, labor, and inherited cultures, while responding to his lived experience and fluidly shifting between the distant past and the visceral present — from the skillful manipulation of leather, inspired by the traditions of leather processing by Indigenous peoples, to the pervasive fear and anxiety that characterize much of contemporary America. Throughout all of his works, Pérez uses highly personal materials: a wide range of upcycled and scrapped leathers, often sourced from his father’s upholstery shop, as well as from other local upholsterers. With dexterity and vision accrued through years spent working in his father’s shop, Pérez sees endless possibilities and layers of history contained within these leathers. For the artist, the leathers possess both a potent conceptual and stylistic weight — a distinctive ability to carry embedded narratives, and unique surface qualities that can guide the formal and compositional choices he makes in the final works’ creation.

In this exhibition, those familiar with Pérez’s practice will be immediately struck by a new facet to the artist’s work — an ardent embrace of emotionally-charged color in several pieces. Throughout much of his career, the artist has worked within the neutral palette of most found leather, attracted to the variations of natural tones, hues, and markings characteristic of the material. One sees a couple of new pieces that continue to mine this terrain; however, one also sees the fruits of the artist’s ongoing experimentation within painting and of his long pursuit of  its deconstruction within his practice. Since his days as an undergraduate student at CalArts, Pérez has carved his own path through the traditions of painting  — rejecting stretcher bars in favor of unstretched canvas before replacing canvas entirely with leather; first applying paint thickly, then putting down the traditional brush in exchange for the paint sprayer; trading the pencil and pen for a tattoo machine and engraving tools. In some ways, that pursuit has appeared quiet as he’s worked mostly with translucent acrylic paints and subtle scarring on the surface of his paintings. Now drawn to a palette of vibrant, rich, and saturated hues, the artist’s inventive and radical sensibility as a painter is at full volume. The colors for his new works still emerge from the foundational leather source material; but, as he scours upholstery shops, he seeks out unique scraps in reds, blues, greens, pinks, and violets — anything outside the tendency of consumer taste. Further stripping the materials from the consumerist phase of their past, Pérez  has begun to apply paint directly onto the leather scraps and create his own unique surface finishes.

The new work The Flesh and the Bone (2025) — an entirely abstract composition composed of hues of brick and blood reds, and marbled and muted pinks — fully showcases Pérez’s integration of color and painterly looseness. As the artist builds layers upon layers of acrylic paint atop the leather pieces hanging in his studio, excess run-offs harden on the walls, congealing into delicate icicle-like forms. Pérez has begun to peel off the hardened paint scraps to collage them onto the surface of the works as an extension of his upcycling of scrap materials. In an opposing process of surface subtraction, the artist also scars the surface to strip away the leather’s factory finish and reveal the raw suede underneath, generating a speckled dotting texture effect across passages of the painting’s surface that mirrors the unpredictable flow of the paint specks. While free of any articulated bodily presence or figurative form, the work possesses an undeniable corporeality, its vulnerability and violence emanating solely from its color, texture, and surface.

A resonantly anxious energy courses through the work Three Shadows of Blue (2025). Also marking new terrain for the artist, this piece consists of a singular, expansive piece of leather, rather than his more customary compositions of dozens of discrete sewn-together elements. Pérez found the piece already dyed in an intense ultramarine blue over a suede finish. Taken by its scale and color, he left the piece intact and chose to paint heavily over the whole surface in a range of dark, saturated hues, before scarring lines to reveal the blue suede lying underneath. Comprised of one holistic surface, the work resembles a visual grain shift, a disorienting collapse of the world into static, upon which an amorphous, many-tentacled form floats. Its representation remains unknowable — is it an endless spinal column, an animal nervous system, a distant celestial body? The work's potency resides within that uncertainty, with Pérez tapping into the inarticulable and alchemical powers of color, material, and abstraction to open intangible pathways for thought and questioning with no clear ends or answers in sight.

Esteban Ramón Pérez (b. 1989, Los Angeles; MFA, Yale University, 2019; BFA, CalArts, 2017). Pérez’s work is held in the permanent collections of the Pérez Art Museum Miami, the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, and the North Dakota Museum of Art. He was awarded the NXTHVN Fellowship in 2020-2021 and the Artadia: Los Angeles Grant Award in 2022. His first solo institutional exhibition, Distorted Myths, opened at Staniar Gallery, Washington & Lee University, Lexington, VA, in 2022. In 2023, he presented new works in the Hammer Museum's biennial Made in L.A. 2023: Acts of Living. In 2024, Pérez held his first international solo exhibition at Galleria Poggiali in Milan, Italy; and presented work at the ICA: San Francisco and Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, FL. In addition to Charles Moffett, his work has been exhibited at galleries such as Lehmann Maupin (New York, NY), James Cohan (New York, NY), The Mistake Room (Los Angeles, CA), Honor Fraser (Los Angeles, CA), and The Shepherd (Detroit, MI), among others.