If you're an artist and you don't know his name, you should probably just quit now. Javier Peres, of Berlin's Peres Projects, has had an intrepid influence on the art world, helping to establish contemporary art as we currently know it. His gallery represents big names like Terrence Koh, Dan Colen, Joe Bradley, and Dash Snow (plus this weird Belgian collective he recently discovered called Leo Gabin, who, as Javier informed me, are helping Harmony Korine with his already-infamous new film Spring Breakers). Originally from Cuba, but having grown up all over the world, he's developed an undeniably infectious middle-finger-to-the-world attitude that's worked wonders for him. I mean, can you call the late River Phoenix a friend? I didn't think so. If you find yourself in Berlin (or at Art Basel), his space is not one to miss.

Javier and I chatted over Skype about the post-recession art world, raw food diets, and trashy tabloid rags.

You’ve been in the game for a while. Why’d you get into art in the first place, and how do you feel about it now, in retrospect?
I was practicing law and collecting art and I wanted to collect more. I wanted to figure out a way that I could stop living the corporate life and focus on it. My then boyfriend and I had this attitude that was like: “do whatever the fuck you want when you want, because you’re not going to get another shot.” I went to go see the Eva Hesse retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and I came out and was like shit—that bitch got a fucking tumour the size of a brick in her head and died when she was 35. Why should my fate be any different? So that’s how it started.

From there I set forward, not knowing what I was doing. I started the gallery with just a small group of artists that I believed in. That was the focus, and to some extend that remains the focus. But 2008 changed the whole fucking world. It changed the game. We realized we weren’t invincible. We realized we could be conquered, divided, broken up, sold, and destroyed. The way I look at it now is quite different. I need to pay rent, I need to pay my employees, I need to pay for production. And I still work largely with younger artists that are well known. But being well known doesn’t always mean high prices. Works by famous artist don’t necessarily sell for that much. There are plenty of instances where that happens. Artists who were doing well had to drop their prices. We’ve had to deal with this.

I’ve always thought of your relationship with the art world and your artists as being more about your passion for their art specifically and not about the money.
You guys didn’t have a recession in Canada.

No, not like the rest of the world did. Did it affect you in Berlin?
Of course. Once you’re already down, you can’t fall much further. We didn’t really see it too much. But galleries closed, the nature of exhibition changed. I’m showing more paintings now that I’ve ever shown. All those big performances, those big installations: where the fuck are they now? They’re gone. There was a period where it was all about the friendship and the camaraderie that I had with my artists. I think that’s changed, to be honest. Since I felt that way, I’ve gone through a major divorce. I’ve become a lot more jaded. I’ve changed.

I just recently started an all raw food, fruit and vegetable diet. The reason I bring this up is because if you’d asked me a year ago if Javier Peres would ever do that, I would have been like “fuck you—no way—I eat what I want when I want.” I’d kill you and eat your arm. But life has changed and now I am eating fifteen bananas a day. I feel fantastic. I eat avocados, peaches, tangerines. I’m super happy about it. Am I going to stop drinking and doing drugs? I don’t think so. But I’m going to eat what’s real to me.

I bring this up because I think it’s a metaphor. It’s symbiotic. I never would have thought I would have done that. I always thought with some of the artists I used to hang out with that “I’ll hang out with them until I die.” But now I’m not hanging out with them. The guy that I was with, I thought I’d be with him until I die. Well, we split.  It’s taken me the better part of the last two years to reconcile that and to figure out what that means to Peres Projects. We’re at a stage in the gallery’s development where there are a lot of other people involved. I’m having my own solo project somewhere else. I asked Peres Projects to show me, and Peres Projects wouldn’t show me. I’m not the only one in the machine.

It’s interesting that it’s so collaborative, because it bares your name. And there’s this theme of glamour that I associate with Peres Projects, which flowed through you. I was looking at Mark Flood’s “People Are Strangle” video, which reflects on surveillance and voyeurism, and which I associate with tabloid culture. You’ve just done a series of portraits that touch on that. Is celebrity culture important to you?
Well, yes, my paintings are portraits of River Phoenix. I’ve shown James Franco. I grew up very close to Hollywood as a teenager, and so Hollywood and Hollywood culture are close to me, but I’m not really interested in celebrity culture. It’s just that I happen to know some people who have become very famous. When I walk by the newsstand and see People Magazine or Us Weekly, I don’t buy them. I do buy Hello, because in Europe we have not only celebrity culture, but also aristocratic culture. I look at that stuff. But only on the plane. We live in a world where you can become a celebrity doing nothing. You can have a big ass like Kim Kardashian. The art world really replicates these spheres.

In the same way, there’s a reverence for death in celebrity. River Phoenix’s level of fame is arguably associated with his death. You said in your interview with AnOther recently that there’s a religiosity that’s associated with your series. I was also really interested in its repetition.
That’s what I’m interested in, too. My reference to religion relates to repetition. I took an image and replicated it multiple times, similar to the way that, for example, St. Sebastian or Jesus Christ would have been replicated, with different results each time, even when created by the same person or the same workshop. It’s a similar experience in a lot of primitive cultures or “Other” cultures, where they represent their deities. I collect African art and I’m quite knowledgeable about pre-European-contact African culture.  In African cultures, every single tribe did the same shit: they would all have their ideal person, male or female, and they would replicate it over and over and each time, you’d end up with a different result.

I’ve been very influenced by that notion and I was thinking about River a lot because I had a lot of contact with him. When I started going through my breakup, I found myself in this very heavy isolation. I was really fucked in the head. It made me start asking myself “how did I end here?” I never thought I would be an almost 40-year-old dude stuck in this huge flat in Berlin by himself. That was not written in my cards. I always knew really interesting people and always had great boyfriends and I would dump their asses. Never did they dump my ass. And there I was getting dumped by some fucker. That triggered something for me and next thing you know, I’m doing the unthinkable: I’m an art dealer making art.

I love that. It’s a great turn-around.
I could have told everybody that I had been doing it all along for all these other fuckers, but now I’m doing it for myself. It’s a little bit of a fuck you.

How long have you been making art? Your art is very representationally accomplished. I was surprised, because I’ve never seen any of your other art.
First of all, I haven’t done things under my own name. I’ve done art under other people’s names. I can make a lot of different things. I’ve lead a lot of different lives. I can still do backflips even though I’m a fat fucker, because I was a gymnast for 15 years. I find representational painting a lot harder than abstract, though. I have this whole room of big-ass canvases and I’m overwhelmed, but I’m going to get through them.

Speaking of overwhelmed, I was really into Mark Flood’s “People Are Strangle” video…
You ain’t seen nothing yet. Mark installed a whole collaged room dedicated to Justin Bieber. It’s insane.

Javier Peres' One Of Ours runs from January 12-February 5 at Grimmuseum, Berlin. Mark Flood's People Are Strangle runs from January 14-March 10 at Peres Projects, Berlin - Mitte.

Jessica Carroll is Toronto Standard’s editorial assistant. She’s really pretty and writes a daily column about stuff she thinks is funny/weird on the internet. She tweets at @jssckr.