Who is Your God? Esteban Ramon Perez: Under Your Fate (Bet I’ll Be Damned)

Text by Taylor Aldridge

Work by Southern California based artist, Esteban Ramon Perez, is deeply informed by his familial history and upbringing in contemporary Los Angeles Chicano culture.? During his childhood, Perez’s father owned and operated an upholstery shop, which operated first out of their San Bernardino home garage, where Perez worked as an apprentice at an early age.? The home and studio space engineered a distinct education in sewing, and crafting primarily leather material into utilitarian objects.? Perez learned how to alter leather into outfitting furniture, automobiles, and clothing. Scraps of leather were often dispersed and discarded throughout the studio space, like hair in a barbershop.??

It wasn’t until Perez earned candidacy in Yale’s MFA painting program that he adopted a practice of reprocessing these discarded leather materials from his fathers upholstery shop.? Described as the “church of painting,” Perez found the technical aspects of Yale’s painting pedagogy misaligned with his own desired trajectory in artmaking.? As a way to gesture back to his place of origin and familial background, he incorporated scraps of leather cut by his father into singular, large scale compositions. Then, with a sewing machine needle, he would inscribe drawings onto the leather surface, like a tattoo needle to porous skin.??

This distinct practice,? which has become Perez’s primary modus operandi elicits an intimate encounter with familial craft, upcycling of discarded materials, and a scarring effect of mark making, that is often obscured for the viewer, unless they are within close proximity to the artwork. This sensibility of incorporating discarded materials pulls from a broader Chicano practice called Rasquache.? As art critic Jennifer Heath noted; “In Spanish, rasquache means ‘leftover’ or ‘of no value.’ In Chicano vernacular, it describes an attitude, the taste or lifestyle of the underdog.” In the context of art history, we might associate rasquache with the Arte Povera movement and manifesto, in that their practitioners relied upon, and elevated discarded materials that were associated with low class, and objects that were assumed to lack value.? However, whereas Arte Povera championed an antiform, Rasquache celebrates the methodology of foraging and making something from nothing, to make something beautiful.? Where Arte Povera is a critical indictment of mainstream culture, and bureaucratic systems that create systems of scarcity, rasquache is simply a way of life, and epistemology embedded within Chicano culture that is rooted in resourcefulness and creativity.?

In this presentation, Under Your Fate (Bet I’ll be Damned), Perez expands on this epistemology to engage with concepts of colonialism, religious iconography, art history, and economies of fate. For this suite of works, Perez makes references to classic and contemporary art history to explore themes of luck, as a religiosity all on its own, and how these beliefs reflect more orthodox religions.??

For instance, in Chance Encounters (Annunciation) (2024), Perez incorporates The Annunciation (1390-95) by Gothic Renaissance Italian painter, Tommaso del Mazza.? Mazza’s scene is an image of a biblical narrative that is frequently depicted throughout art history and in popular culture; conveying the story of archangel Gabriel visiting the Virgin Mary to inform her of the immaculate conception of Jesus Christ.? Classic holy figures of Gabriel and Virgin Mary are locked in a gaze as Gabriel’s arm is raised, with the index finger and middle finger joined, as if commanding attention for declarative action. In another painting that depicts this scene, made approximately three centuries later by Black American painter Henry Ossawa Tanner, Gabriel’s character is embodied by an omnipresent light that greets Virgin Mary in a dark bedroom.? Also entitled The Annunciation (1898), Tanner’s magical realist portrayal renders Mary in trepidation, distanced from the angelic light, but keenly attuned to its message. Perez’s take on this biblical narrative in Chance Encounters (The Annunciation), displays the other side of a fateful circumstance; archangel Gabriel carries a skull with two scythe’s behind their wing, indicating a message of bad luck, rather than a merry message of holy conception.? In Eagle Seraphin (I Reckon Luck Sees Us the Same) (2024), Perez scars a leather drawing depicting a Mayan Warrior, with a an oozing ligament that portrays a black lucky 8-ball, derived from the distinct ouvré of the late contemporary painter, Martin Wong.? Similar to archangel Gabriel, written in the Judeochristian context, Mayan warriors serve as intermediaries between God(s) and living beings of the world, which originates in Mexican folklore. Through this amalgam of Catholic, and indigenous beliefs, paired with art historical iconography, the artists suggest concepts of predetermined fates and divine intervention through a variety of faith systems.??

In works such as This Cylindrical System of Life (Vicious Cycles) (2024), and Corona (Heavy is the Head) (2024), the artist has employed the practice of extracting animal skin and developing it into a upholstery material. This process of tanning begins with stretching the hide taut with stretcher bars, in order to scrape off the hair and fat of animal hide before throwing it into tanning solution.? Perez draws similarities between stretching canvas in the practice of traditional painting, however, utilizing the tanning process and materials in his artmaking, allows for an opportunity to decolonialize his material choices, and gesture back to methodologies that are present within the lexicon of his heritage and familial history. As Perez has shared recently: “My formal decisions up to this point were in the interest of challenging and perverting painting, and if I was to go back to the stretcher bar, I wanted a solution that would conceptually make sense, but that would also push the painting towards an object and would continue to challenge painting traditions.”

In Under Your Fate (Bet I’ll Be Damned) Perez’s commingles various mythologies as they relate to fate, faith and luck. Through the use of narrative nomenclature for work titles, and the gathering of seemingly disparate divine figures within art historical and colonial frameworks, Perez purports that those with bad luck, are deeply intertwined with those who encounter good luck. And that each polarity reminds us of how relative each of these experiences are.