Rafael Perez was born on May 16, 1938 in Montalban, a small town to the west of Caracas in Venezuela. In 1958 he founded the Academy of Arts Rafael Monasterio in Maracay in the Venezuelan state Aragua, whose director he still is today. Today he lives and works in Venezuela and periodically in Switzerland.
The exhibited work of art by Rafael Perez entitled "Espacios geometricos" from the Arithmeum Collection embodies a more subtle form of movement. The sixteen equal, square picture-objects placed in four rows on a common base, generate many small sources of irritation which together tend to disturb the inherent static nature of the picture. Not only are the edges of these square objects painted, which leads to movement when one passes the picture, but the coloured stripes bordering the red squares and also the blue ones are not equal in length: for the red squares the longest border stripe is on the right and the shortest on top, while for the blue squares the longest is along the bottom edge and the shortest on the right. Naturally, colour also plays an essential role in this work of art. Its changing structure is, for example, emphasized by the different colour scheme for the four squares at the bottom right. In addition, Perez plays with complementary colours. In contrast to the complementary colour pair red-green he uses a not exactly complementary colour-pair in the four above-mentioned squares, which results in a flickering colour contrast at their edges. This phenomenon works against the viewer's desire for a harmonious chord of colours. The freedom with which Perez choses his colours is further evidence of his independent and individual understanding of geometric constructivist art. His sense of colour is not calculated but subjective, and this is what gives the paintings of Rafael Perez their distinctive character.