IN THE PAST few years Mr. Peres, 36, has emerged on the art scene as a powerful, and controversial, dealer and gallerist whose brightest star is Mr. Koh. He has galleries in L.A. and Berlin, and represents a small but influential bevy of artists—a majority of whom live in New York. So when he’s in town, his nights are full. After the Phillips de Pury auction, he’d arranged to meet Dan Colen, another artist he represents, at Mr. Colen’s Tribeca studio sometime after midnight, which left a few hours for dinner and drinks with two lady friends at Craftsteak on 10th Avenue.

“I would never invest money in art, not as an investment,” said Mr. Peres, who sat upright on the edge of the booth, a black ball cap with white pinstripes atop his cherubic face. He ordered another round of vodka ginger ales. “I mean, it’s a pain in the ass to maintain, it’s a lot of responsibility, super fragile, and it’s hard to move around. It’s not a good investment.

“That’s why what is happening in the art business now, in addition to the global financial situation, is all these people thought it was a good investment,” he continued. “They thought, ‘Oh, I’ll get my dick sucked, and I’ll go to parties and I’ll make money from it!’ Like, no! There are much better ways to make money. You could make much more money off prostitution, you could money-launder, you could traffic drugs—there are a lot more things you could make a lot more money off."

Mr. Peres grew up in Cuba and comes from an old wealthy Spanish family. His paternal grandparents, Josefa and Mario, made it their business to buy as much art as they could afford, and he estimates the family collection—which includes works by Picasso, Goya, El Greco and many modern artists—is worth close to half a billion dollars. The art resides in a trust that prevents it from ever being sold; Mr. Peres’ brother manages the collection. “My older brother has an amazing collection that he inherited and he’s just like, ‘Fuck!’” said Mr. Peres.

Mr. Peres’ tastes run to the extreme. His artist Dash Snow’s work has infamously included covers of the New York Post covered with his own semen; in 2007, Terence Koh’s solo installation at Art Basel consisted of glass cases containing gold-plated pieces of what he claimed was his own excrement; they sold for a total of $500,000.

In his role as merchant, Mr. Peres says his priority has been to help finance his artists’ projects, and then set prices to ensure that pieces wind up in the right hands, in other words clients who will respect the work, as opposed to just selling to whoever shows up with the most cash. But, he added, “we’ve been looking at the books a little bit more lately. Whereas before we didn’t look at them at all: It was just spend, spend, spend.”

It is a business model that has brought some of his artists, such as the notorious Mr. Snow, as well as Messrs. Colen and Koh, tremendous success at astonishing speed. That tight-knit group of hard-living, experimental artists reside within a 10-block radius in the Lower East Side, which Mr. Peres refers to as the “New, New School.” In the words of Mr. Colen, who has a show at the Gagosian Gallery in London later this month, “It’s a really nice community. And we wouldn’t even exist without [Javier].”

Mr. Peres has never had the desire to actually live in that community, and divides his time between Los Angeles and Berlin. But he keeps a full-time office in New York; he sweeps through town every six weeks or so, meets with his artists, goes to restaurants, maybe throws a few parties. He was recently banned from staying at the Rivington Hotel because of some damage to the room. Mr. Peres also poured some water on a bald security guard’s head.

“I was like, ‘Well, you’re the one with the shaved head. I don’t have a shiny bald head.’” He laughed. He added that he was not attracted to men with bald heads.

“New York has everything for everybody, even for somebody like me who doesn’t need to be here,” he said.

Mr. Peres began his professional life as a corporate immigration lawyer practicing mainly out of San Francisco. Collecting was just a passion, one that took him all over the world. Then in 2002, certain family matters were sorted out, allowing him to no longer worry about money.

“Law required more focus than I was willing to give it,” he said. “There was one moment when there was a show at San Francisco MoMA that I really wanted to see, and I almost missed the thing because I was so busy—and I realized, ‘Fuck work! Why am I working? What’s the point of this?’”

He opened a gallery in San Francisco but soon cooled on the city. He’d brought the work of Assume Vivid Astro Focus from New York for a show at his gallery. The bigwigs in the San Francisco art scene turned up, praised the work and left it on the floor. 

“It’s just insane; the city blows,” Mr. Peres said. “All the people from SF MoMA and stuff came and they were like, ‘It’s really great.’ And I was like, is that how it works here? ’Cause when I was a collector, if I saw something I liked, I bought it. So if it was ‘great,’ I expected you to buy it—not like ‘Mwah! Mwah! Mwah!’ I’m like, ‘Don’t kiss me, get the fuck out of my fuckin’ face if you’re not going to buy the damn things.’”

Mr. Peres wound up buying most of the collection himself, and moving his gallery to Los Angeles. Two years later, he produced AVAF’s show at the Whitney Biennial.

In fairness to San Francisco, he says the crazed era of art as hot commodity with snazzy, social perks—a trade that was still strong as of a couple months ago—brought with it more kisses than sales.

“I remember from the first [Art Basel] Miami to the most recent Miami, it’s all these people who are just like tapping their wines and having a fucking grand old time,” he said. “Just taking up my fucking time and not buying a fucking thing. And I’m super-fucking claustrophobic. I hate having people around me—if I’m not fucking you, I don’t want you around me.”

At Art Basel 2005, through the fog of wine goggles, Mr. Peres was introduced to Mr. Colen, who was making super-realist bird droppings. Six months later, Mr. Colen had an idea for something bigger. He called Mr. Peres and asked him for $10,000.

“The check’s in the mail,” came the response. “You’ll have it tomorrow.”

The piece, which was a super-realist re-creation of fellow artist Dash Snow’s apartment wall, wound up costing Mr. Peres $18,000. A year later, the work, “Secrets and Cymbals, Smoke and Scissors,” was purchased by Charles Saatchi for $500,000.

In 2007, Mr. Peres and Mr. Koh took over a building on Canal Street that  serves as Mr. Koh’s studio and a clubhouse for the “New, New School” community, which they have branded the Asia Song Society—“ASS” for short. The ASS boys are not afraid to push comparisons to Warhol’s Factory.

In the past five years, Mr. Peres estimates he has purchased between 300 to 400 works for his personal collection. He has no idea what it all might be worth. Mr. Koh—whose entire first show Mr. Peres bought for $11,000 in 2002—was his first artist to break through.

“One piece from that collection sold at Phillips for I think $55,000,” said Mr. Peres. “And I sold privately two other pieces from that show for a quarter-million,” he said, opening his eyes wide.

Mr. Peres is contented by an increase in market value but …

“Americans have trouble appreciating art because they are always asking, ‘If I buy this now, will I make money?’ And don’t get me wrong. I like money. If somebody wants to resell something for a shitload of money and we can do it, we do it great.

“Money is money and we all need it. My interest is the history of art. So the fact that something sells for a lot of money, in and of itself, is not enough for me. The question is, is it historically salient? Is the artist historically salient? So I don’t know if Terence, if Dan, if Dash, if Agathe, Christina, Mark, whoever—if they sell for a lot of money or not, it’s not so much relevant. And for most of them, it isn’t, either. I mean, they need money to do what they’re doing. I need money to do what I’m doing—so we need to cover that base. And then the other base is simply, is it good enough to make art history, will people give a fuck about it? That’s what I try to keep as my focus.”

It was approaching midnight; Mr. Colen was waiting and Mr. Peres’ female guests were getting restless.

The next day, he woke up in time to visit with Dash Snow before going to dinner at the home of clients, the art philanthropists Phil and Shelley Aarons.  Sunday morning he dropped by the Canada  gallery on Chrystie Street to see a show by [another of his artists] Joe Bradley. (About a year ago, a late night chat on the Lower East Side had led him to Mr. Bradley’s studio. He liked what he saw, bought everything there.) Then straight back to the airport to catch a flight to Berlin, for Monday meetings and a photo shoot for a Swedish magazine. Via BlackBerry he told me that he was bracing for another sleepless night and catching a morning flight to L.A., where he had a group show Thursday—comprised largely of his New York artists—and on Saturday was unveiling a new gallery in Culver City.

“My friends and I recently decided we’re going to drink as much as we can and spend as much money as we can, and hopefully it will catch on,” he said over the phone. “That’s kind of how I’m seeing it. I’m going to do bigger and better shows.

“We have slowed down a bit,” he added. “But my slow is fast.”

smorgan@observer.com