The spirit lives in chaos
(Ten steps to assemble a portrait of Víctor Hugo Pérez)
León Plascencia Ñol
Mexico city, colonia Roma, september 2014.
- By the end of the nineties or beginning of the following decade, in a gray and monotonous Guadalajara, probably in the same studio of the visual artist Víctor Hugo Pérez or in a small gallery, I saw some of his paintings. Memory deceives, but what matters is the emotion felt when facing those canvases absolutely irreverent and iconoclastic in a city too conservative. In my eyes there was a feeling of oddness and discomfort, but also the certainty or the intuition that I was before an artist of great strength.
- At his studio, the books of his favorite authors laid on the floor, smeared, opened in some page, which, I guess, Víctor Hugo Pérez had been analyzing moments or days before; here and there, you could see empty bottles, an undone bed with sheets that hadn’t been changed in a long time; bookshelves crammed with books in no order, papers built an almost cinematographic setting, floors had oil painting stains, same as the half lit bathroom, under a yellowish light –I thought about the photographs preserved from the Francis Bacon studio-; the reflections coming from the outside were tinged with the disorder and dust specks that were carried up slowly by the wind; outside, on the avenue, the world happened in different way.
- The painted image transforms the absent –either because it happened far away or long ago- into present. The image, the depicted figures –men, women, animals- bring that which describes the here and now. “A photograph is static because it has stopped time. A painting or drawing is static because it encompasses time”, wrote John Berger.
- Víctor Hugo Pérez’ figures are punctual reflections of an action, a fact, a note in a diary. The artist builds and assembles his world in a precise way: each spectator may assemble his or her own registry of events or scenes with a simple detailed observation of each piece or work; the clues are there, as literary phrases or verses that narrate an event. Oddly, as the artist undresses his life experiences, he himself disappears to give rise to an unveiled autobiography or better said, when exposed he becomes invisible. Literature as a registry or words and gestures; we read the words, but we also read the gestures of the figures, the faces and bodies in the foreground. Lines, stains, velatures, color interweaving, reliefs and smudges are records of what we see and what a work that seems to expand to the diverse emotions of the spectator allows us to see.
- Valerio Adami wrote that “Drawing is a literary occupation. I do not abandon a drawing until I’m able to add the word end to it… I would like that words like prose and poetry would be used to, in that way, de ne my work as a painting in prose. The narrative impulse is essential…” A literary occupation. Prose and Poetry: two continents. From this approach, or better said, from this reading, Víctor Hugo Pérez’ work would be in territory of the prose. The painting as an everyday moment that hides a story. The characters of Pérez’ work tell something, say, as if they were beings that whisper or shout to the ear. The use of a colorful palette creates an effect of entirety, loads the canvas with sense, fills it with narrativity. When observing the artist work, the spectator faces images loaded with sense and emotionality, before spaces filled with meticulousness so nothing is left missing. Void does not exist here, it does not have a place, it has to be filled completely before the possible fear to the horror vacui; better to fill up so the world does not disappear. Maybe that is why the disappearance of the artist is possible.
- It has been written about the possible influences on the artist work and immediately names come up. Maybe the most immediate: Jean Dubuffet, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Orozco, but in sight, other possibilities open up; I think of two worlds very close to the grotesque spirit or monstrosity in Víctor Hugo’s work, I refer to certain temperature in the images of Otto Dix and Willem de Kooning. The Royal Academy of Spanish Language has three meanings for the word monstrosity: 1. Serious disorder in the proportion that things should have according to nature or what is consider to be regular. 2. Extreme ugliness or disproportion in physical or moral attributes. 3. Monstrous thing. Do any of these definitions help encompass Víctor Hugo Pérez’ work? I believe that all three have the density that the artist aims to reach, but with a particular twist, which is in fact what makes his work step out of the most traveled road: the monstrosity aspires beauty or just how Canadian Anne Carson wanted, hold beauty. To keep the beauty, a form of beauty, in the spirit of chaos.
- The artist Mark Tobey wrote: “May nature dominate your work. These words from my old friend Takizaki, vague at the beginning, are cleared up by the idea: Erase yourself. Certain artists talk today about the act of painting. In its best sense, this could include what my best friend wanted to say. It is the necessary spirit in the Antecomienzo (Prebeginning) and the act depends on it”.
- To erase one self. Let the nature dominate your work. Phrases that acquire an imminent condition in Víctor Hugo Pérez’ work. Which nature are we talking about? I talk about the nature that emerges from violence: lines that cover extensions of a canvas as if they wanted to erase themselves; lines of color which are yuxtaposed, stacked up, blocked, veiled one from another to form a strained temperature, like someone who is prostrated to fever and what appears before his eyes are images from a dream.
- I return almost to the beginning of this text. The character who lives in that study in disorder gave a feeling of shyness and self-confidence. I remember him explaining one of the paintings- a woman with her dress up showing her pussy while a group of black letters over a yellow background dripped to the ground- and at same time she tried to uncover with her right hand her face covered with hair. Víctor Hugo Pérez was wearing a tweed, maybe gray, a matching trouser and an unpolished pair of boots. The character under construction was almost done, same as his work, who along all these years has given proof of an ability of unclassified style; one that is recognized almost immediately. The spectator enters into a state of hypnosis when facing a piece of work from this artist from Guadalajara. It seems that the painting has taken control of one self. Baruma, the Chinese zen teacher, practiced the contemplation of the wall or hekkan. Through this state one could see beyond the eyes and mind. When standing in front of a piece of Pérez, a process similar to the hekkan is taking place: the eyes see beyond the canvas.
- In the Pérez’ work inhabit a large dosage of the unexpected, the unpredictable, humor and excess inhabits Pérez work, but also within it all, peeking almost shyly, there is a feeling of fragility. Maybe this is what makes the artist work so powerful.