José Luis Barrios mentions that “the cause of the representation is the look of desire, but the effect of desire rests on the own image that gazes at us”. And is indeed, when we stand in front of a piece of Víctor Hugo Pérez, that we cannot stop thinking about two aspects: the first deals with the context of crux and shape, in relation to the remembrance of the violent and sordid nightmares of childhood as possible theme; the second addresses the reading of the technique employed as part of the creation process, in which the primitive hands of the artist apply the telluric matter of the primary colors on the canvas as part of the art that rises from the ritual, according to Jane Ellen Harrison. As if the artist wishes to catch with the open palms of his hands, the oneiric specters of the night that ride on the distressing violent saturation of space, leaving aside the perspective and the planes.

      The oneirism characterizes on its basis by the visual hallucinations that surround other senses and are expressed through touch and hearing creating what is known as “oneiric delirium”. And it is maybe, that first oneiric impression that the work of Víctor Hugo reveals to us, with its specters wandering in the canvas space, almost with the intuition that at some point they will come alive, but above all, with the perception of listening closely to the echo of their strident screams, emitted with a high-pitched and free tone by certain figures that are closer to the personification of psychosis.

“All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream” says Edgar Allan Poe, -as mentioned at the beginning of the text-, like those lucid and at the same time monstrous dreams experimented during childhood, and that are now used by the artist to create, through the artifice and purpose of the technique, the ghostly effect of fever on the recipient. But this oneirism in Pérez’s work is not only pictorial but also literary, as he uses different resources in a latent way, such as allusions, signs and symbols, within a frame more narrative than poetic to title his work.

      I remember one time, -to be more specific- at an exhibition of Víctor Hugo in Mexico city, the artist commented while answering to my question regarding his work, “that his work, more than a heap of influences, was a tribute to the great artists he admires and in whom he recognizes himself” where we can perceive the strength of the lines of a Vincent Van Gogh; the shapes and shadows, which remind us of the anti-totemic and calamitous dogs from Baudelaire’s magnificent literary work El spleen de París, in which the hounds roam lonely down the sinuous torrents of the big cities, and are present in Rufino Tamayo’s work; the violence of the immediacy also perceived in the primary colors of the raw matter in Jean-Michel Basquiat’s; without forgetting Pablo Picasso’s footprint and his fauna of roosters and cats catching and devouring the electric birds with a monumental appearance of crows, with that distortion effect on the characters looks, with sharp hoofs on the canvas weave. Thus Víctor Hugo’s search hasn’t been blind, but heuristic instead, although based on his own experience, where the artist has accumulated this existential baggage and has transfigured it into an oneiric and telluric ritual, into a palimpsest of violence. 

      In Víctor Hugo’s ghostly bestiary we can appreciate an ironic and sarcastic breath of failure, from the topics of sex and religion by excellence, always with elements that play with the illusion of the autobiographic, with a keen wink of irreverence as seen in his work collage and in his “exquisite corps”, in which more than revealing an erotic character in the line of Georges Bataille’s postulates, they demystify the aesthetic pleasure in the voyeur’s doctrine until being ridiculed to its minimum expression. 

      But Víctor Hugo’s search mentioned above has been notable, as in pieces like The Run (La huida) we can verify an exploration of other techniques and supports like the approach with the retable or the votive offering, and in which in a manner of leitmotiv, the elements such as the “bird of desire” and the dog make up the role; one of sacrificed and the other of “sacrifier”; one for its condition of tortured and the other as a torturer, metaphorically symbolizing the love, in which sometimes cohabit and other times confront all along the work, and I dare to affirm that Víctor Hugo has a closer bond, something that goes beyond the identification and filiation, as a mimetic syndrome of ambivalence with reference to both characters, in their proceeding and their acting in the urban plane.

      This urban act-ritual we are talking about, is nothing else but the wandering of the dog and the strolling of Víctor Hugo, from his childhood until today, as an event typical of a mental state, of a trance, as explained by Walter Benjamin regarding the idea of the wandering, in which these strolls worked as a fertile breeding ground so the visual artist would participate from the inside into his work, and not only depicting the city as a separated observer, but diving into the metropolis to make the recipient a voyeur, “a botanic of the sidewalk”, as we can verify in the pieces of The Angel of Independence (El ángel de la independencia) and The Westin, where the contemporary images of the city interweave in an act-ritual that rebukes us violently, with keen eye and spying sense, with the common and vital need of an aggression, of an omen and a premonition where all makes sense, creating for us, many times, the impression of being deprived of themselves, before the vulnerability of being bitten by a dog.