LUJÁN PERÉZ

Your Nostalgia Created A Non-Existent Country

Curated By Anne Laure Lemaitre

November 13th - December 10th, 2021

Memories are never linear. They are fugitive amalgams of intertwined moments of significance and uncanny details we remember through the prism of our past and current feelings. Often, elements will blend to create the cohesive intimate language and dream-like architecture that in part will feed our understanding of ourselves.

Lujan Perez’ work explores this undefined space where scenes and objects become more than their representation alone. Her large scale works on paper, mix of printmaking, painting and drawing, are in-between territories made vessels that evoke how dreams, thoughts and memories blend and associate to enhance the map of our subconscious.

Every work presented in Your Nostalgia Created a Non-Existent Country dialogues with the next. Common elements change scale or are displaced, taking the main stage or becoming trivial background details. Each composition is a gathering of inspirations and life moments-iPhone images, a piece of gum under a table, an embrace, a craigslist ad, a bad joke-which combine into innermost evocative visions of fantasized moments; a dinner table from the point of view of a five years old, a tender exchange of an imagined flower, a surface on which a series of little horses built of stone are resting, the intimacy felt in looking at a loved one’s toes wiggling.

A nomad since the age of 5, Lujan Perez has developed due to the constant urgency of a life adrift a keen sense of adaptability, assimilation, presence and a need to approach every situation, relationship or experience with an equivalent sense of preciousness and seriousness. From her disconnection anxiety and eternal yearning of belonging blossomed a deep connection to nature as a means to root oneself. Plants are an ongoing motif in Perez’ practice. Their properties become symbols, hints to the deeper cycles and mechanisms by which we all abide. In this series, cuttings loosely inspired by the common toxic houseplant yellow oleander are rising from the silhouettes of the Spanish pots which surrounded Perez as she grew. These flowers act as a common thread between each piece, but also become through their beauty yet toxicity a greater metaphor of the complexity at the core of life itself where trauma, love, celebration, pain and hope coexist.

Drawing from the inherent qualities in Perez’ work, Your Nostalgia Created a Non-Existent Country complements the etherealness so intrinsically present in her practice. Gradient grey walls and small sculptures disseminated around the gallery immerse further the viewer in its evanescence while an induced light air flow allows for the pieces-hung away from the walls using sculptural fixtures-to move subtly enhancing the evocative and fleeting nature of their subject.