Kiko Pérez (Vigo, 1982) presents his third individual exhibition entitled Misterio Mystery at the Heinrich Ehrhardt Gallery.

While his recent artworks retain some of the key features of the artist’s previous oeuvre, other dynamics relating to the methodology, production, materials and forms of viewing employed emerge as new practices in his current work.
On the one hand, paper continues to be a central element, as demonstrated by the large number of pieces which Pérez has produced using this material in recent years, with his latest investigations – fragmented, cropped and hollowed out papers – now on display. Meanwhile, new sculpted figures, many of which derive from the artist’s experimentation with paper, suddenly occupy the space to create a collection of freestanding works, upright and self-supporting, which form a circuit, at times labyrinthine and at others orderly, around which observers can wander.

As such, this new exhibition creates a duality between painting and sculpture which, despite always having been present in Kiko Pérez’s art, is much more evident here. Sculpture is far from foreign to the artist, and the same may be said of wood and MDF, the two materials used in the majority of his new cut-out figures. What could be considered unfamiliar is the spatial configuration of these recent pieces: the place, the scale and the transition from the fragment to the form. Strange, alien-like forms which simultaneously encompass the thickness of a body, the gure and absolute abstraction. Huge cut-outs act as different pieces of a puzzle in which details are enlarged while contours are blurred and disappear to form two silhouettes in a single form. Pieces born of a single mould, separated into a distinct interior and exterior, which ‘mysteriously’ take on their own volume and body. In his sculptural work, Kiko Pérez had already treated the fragmented body as a fetish, a torture device, prosthesis or sexual instrument, but here the new coloured patina, painted paper placed over the MDF surface, lends these sculptures a greater voluptuosity and modernism.