Fumihiro "Charlie Brown" Hayashi of The Last Gallery, Javier Peres of Peres Projects and Emily Sundblad of Reena Spaulings -- three dealers from Tokyo, Los Angeles and New York, respectively -- do a lot more than provide gallery space. They act as cheerleaders, mentors and drinking buddies to the artists they represent. Committed to keeping business authentic even during troubled times and maintaining a vision large enough to embrace the most subversive acts and radical ideas, they are THE REAL DEAL.
It's a bit disconcerting when someone we hardly know is pulling big-time art world strings from his gallery in Los Angeles. However, since Javier Peres, with his Peres Project galleries in L.A. and Berlin, is propelling the careers of such iconoclastic, irascible and idiosyncratic visionaries as Terence Koh, Dash Snow, Dan Colen, Mark Flood, Dan Attoe, Agathe Snow, Assume Vivid Astro Focus and Bruce LaBruce, it's kind of a no-brainer to want to get to know him. That's our not-so-hidden agenda here. But when someone has gone so far in the half-dozen years since first hanging out his shingle in a Chinatown storefront (now in Culver City), pushing a conceptual and visual agenda so very radical, queer, spectacular, smart, decadent and delirious, you know he's going to have some pretty interesting observations on the character of our current cultural dislocation. And as appealing as his phenomenal success may be, it's really Peres's legendary appetites (by various accounts a combination of booze, drugs and big cocks) and his nocturnal lifestyle that make him such an unlikely and unimpeachable culture hero.
Our conversation, coming so soon after the untimely passing of that most brilliant enfant terrible of the New York art world, Dash Snow, cannot help but begin with this ending. As a dealer who seems more bound to his artists by the intensity of personal relationships than the steady moderation of business professionalism, Javier's long-term involvement with Snow seems at once easy and complicated. "Dash and I were first and foremost friends," he explains, "our working relationship only came years later because he had always wanted to show with my gallery, and he was not happy with the gallery he had been working with for some time." Peres quickly adds that he always insisted Snow continue to work with his gallery here so he could maintain his representation in New York, acknowledging that he must always balance the bigger picture of the career with the passion of his faith in his artists. "Dash was clearly different, like, really special," he says, "a true OG motherfucker. The dude lived life as he pleased, when he pleased, and the result was this amazing visual experience that for many was just too difficult to understand because he didn't follow any of the rules that the majority of people follow."
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