During the election season, while everyone else’s gaze was fixed worriedly on the White House, Brooklyn artist Enoc Perez was exploring government architecture farther afield. His new painting series, Embassies, arose from a sudden interest he had in our foreign outposts, just when politics closer to home felt ominous. His guiding question for the series: Can examining U.S. embassies around the world give an image of who we think we are as a country?
The paintings in Embassies, now showing at the UTA Artist Space in Los Angeles, render some of the grandest and most spectacular embassy buildings in a style that looks like a cross between an oil painting and a blueprint. Perez plans to paint all 294 U.S. embassies and consulates, but at this point he’s done 10. They range from the midcentury London embassy designed by modernist starchitect Eero Saarinen to the sleek glass-glad Beijing embassy designed by Skidmore Owings & Merrill in 2008. And while each of the buildings conveys a sense of power and national identity, as a sovereign U.S. presence on foreign soil, Perez’s series highlights a discrepancy between the older modernist buildings and the ones that are newly built–while the former portray a sense of hope and optimism, the latter seem mostly concerned with fortification and security.
Perez says he understands why the design language of the embassies has changed over the course of several decades–since 9/11, as terrorist activities have been rising in the West, the U.S. has prized security more than it used to. Still, he likes to think of his paintings as optimistic, even if the some of the buildings themselves don’t give off the same sense of faith in the future. “I found myself finding hope after doing these embassies because many of them give you the feeling of possibility,” he says. “I hadn’t realized this, but a friend [at the show’s opening last weekend] commented that the skies in all of the paintings were blue. So I must be an optimist.”