Perez immersed himself in an emblematic place of the School of Paris: La Grande Chaumière, an art school that did not teach the strict academic principles of the École des Beaux-Arts but encouraged freedom instead. Many famous twentieth-century artists attended it — Zao Wou-Ki, Balthus, Miró, Louise Bourgeois — following the teaching of Bourdelle, Léger and many others.

He made portraits of models on film, using the natural light of the painters' studio, as an homage to the models and painters of bubbling nineteen-twenties Montparnasse, such as Kiki de Montparnasse and Modigliani.