”What will my redeemer be like? I ask myself. Will he be a bull or a man? will he perhaps be a bull with the face of a man? or will he be like me?”

Jorge Luis Borges: The House of Asterion

Ulises Perea is one of the greatest, if not the best, figurative abstract artists in Houston. Born in Mexico City, his paintings cannot be understood apart from the contradictions and horrors of Mexican history. Brutally and masterfully, bullfighting, blood, human sacrifice, slaughter, conquest, revolution and political repression are, maybe, unconsciously depicted. Perea agrees with the great Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges: ”The task of art is to transform what is continuously happening to us, to transform all these things into symbols, into music, into something which can last in man’s memory”. Perea has that rare gift of having created a beautiful and nightmarish world from which you do not want to escape.