The experience with Víctor Hugo Pérez’s paintings is very powerful, and with this phrase I refer both to what the spectator perceives and to what can be observed the author himself lives when he creates them. The lines that appear as epigraph of this text –written by the artist on one of his paintings as a referral to a cutting sentimental narrative- could help characterize some of what the art of painting images means to Víctor Hugo: the great confirmation of his presence in the world. Since the first time I had news about the artist’s work, about a decade ago, I felt I was being witness of a particularly significant trajectory. Víctor is a visual monster, a versifier that succeeds in the  ne arts, an artist that possesses the almost forgotten gift of illuminating myriads of images that, despite being uncountable, always appear with the same level of power.

Kurt Cobain used to say that the bands that made him dream at a young age, always released discography in which all tracks of each album were good; he himself had aspired –and succeeded in great measure- to awaken that fascination of his listeners with his music work. The work of Víctor Hugo is like this: each one of his paintings possesses us, the same way in which in many scenes where he appears, (as if from a Hitchhock novel) the  flock of birds or the pack of dogs are thrown outrageously over the human characters. In fact, the narrative focus of the extraordinary pictorial proposal which livens the artist work up, may be interpreted in terms of a marvelously obscene fable: a universe of animals and beings inhabited by the secret  flame of will of vital liberation.

Victor’s sensitivity lures – from an enigmatic distance, to be said- with visions as those from José Guadalupe Posada, José Clemente Orozco, Ru no Tamayo, Francisco Toledo, Jean Dubuffet, Georg Baselitz and Jean-Michel Basquiat, among others. However, we are talking about an artist who is as educated as irreverent regarding the choice of affiliation to the institutional culture. All of us who know him have witnessed, over and over again, his witty ability of irony upon the idea of a sophisticated artist.

On one unforgettable occasion, Victor Hugo stated during an interview, that he had always wanted to be a “drinker and an unsuccessful artist”; “my dream came true”, concluded marvelously in that public statement. What I want to say with this allusion is that, same as the great W. Somerset Maugham (also a prolific creator) and who would de ne himself as “the best of second-hand writers”, Victor could say about himself, that he has succeeded by means of the voluntary search of defeat.

And defeat in the sense of Victor Hugo is of existential order, that is, result of a profound comprehension of the truth which resides in the positive acceptance of the original fall that lies beneath life. Excessive dreamer, the artist found in the practice of painting, the path to transcendence. His way to address the paintings invoice is symptomatic to the size of the discovery that art revealed to the artist: Victor configures the  fluid of color applying oil painting direct from the tube, painting alla prima the borders of the shapes, saturating massive spaces and outlining continents vibrating with silhouettes; impasting, staining the chromatic order and scratching details, alternatively, on each iconographic section. All this, on the condition of making quick decisions without giving time to interrupt the energetic transmission that goes from the painter’s body to the pictorial support.

The subject pursued by Victor Hugo’s mentality is driven by a tendency to expose a devastating pile of sentimental confessions. In general, the layout or compositional parameter of the paintings, is conceived under structures recognizable in the tribal imagery or equivalents to those of Christian sacred painting of the Byzantine era: introduction of isolated characters laid out in a hieratic style, visible in a semi-abstract forum where a generic setting takes place (part architectural interior, part wild nature scene) which appears every time as a place for passion display. The pictorial alto impasto, the morphic expressionism and the biliary quality of the color, strengthen the ritual aspect and the evolving value of the work.

There is a bit of Paradise or postlapsario Eden (human world understood as a place for the expiation of the fall), when doing the narratology of the visual stories articulated by the master Victor Hugo. The lovers accuse the mark of the inevitable ruptures and the stigmas of spiteful love; but they are also the protagonists of the  re of love, as in many pieces, the writing that accompanies the figures acquires the aspect of intensive statements in favor of the beautiful affective codependency. It is well known among Guadalajara’s art media that Victor Hugo is a living compendium of the heart story-teller (real, fictional? It does not matter). The paintings are full of overwhelming statements, signature maxims that see through the tragic apology of the long gone love or the imploring singing of the coming of the inevitable despair. It is about cathartic boards where we can access the territory of the recovery of grace by means of the art. The shaping of dogs has been specially cultivated by the artist (in paintings and sculptures, discipline in which, by the way, Victor has fortunately made an incursion), and with it I perceive a development of unique sense.

The dog, an animal with a marvelous iconological load is, par excellence, the psicopompo or being which accompanies the human soul in the reign of death; furthermore, dogs symbolize the rise of lust impulse in the context of social order, an island of sexual desire within the scope of civilization. Immemorially, their presence reminds us –in the images and in life- that we can recover the belonging to the pleasant transitoriness of the interior and literal garden. Victor Hugo Perez not only is a great artist of dogs. His sensitivity and speech make him a cínico, in the greek sense of the word, in a “disciple of the dog”; in this case, in a pictorial visionary who knows something which does not have price: that to create is to go through looking up front the indescribable weave of real life, sphere of infinite pleasures while they last and of uncountable falls when they happen. And that Painting is the mysterious art of contemplating irreversible fragments of end experience, with the parsimonious and incorruptible tenderness of a passionate heart.