Paintings produced by Victor Hugo Perez proposes a series of tales about interiority of the subject in the course of everyday life –affects, dreams, desires, fears, impulses-, in combination with an aesthetic of great material impact, dispersed on terms of a unique expressionism, because it is supported by the solo artist, without being part of a group or movement. Interested as well as some themes and concepts of the late-modern, European painting (erotic portray, biophilic still-life, plastic effect of high filling, vibrant chromatism, spiritual formalism) that in some references to the popular imagery (popular art, martyrology, hagiography), Victor Hugo Perez is the unmistakable author of an immense fable in which the protagonism of both the human and animal sides alternate.

The work of Victor Hugo Perez, cultured and wild at the same time, seems to be like a melted version by the effect of an stylistic infatuation or of an act of loving irreverence, from byzantine icons and scenes from paintings from the Paris School as well as from the Mexican School. Sometimes, the painter builds up his own figurations incorporating brief writings or those of medium extension; it is about maximum confessions loaded of lucid irony or delusional descriptions of characters or situations. That introduces in the work of the artist from Jalisco a post-modernist turn à la Jean-Michael Basquiat, but also a wink to the narrative of former votive-offering Catholics. All similarities, influences, quotes or paraphrases detected in the production of Victor Hugo, in relation with historical authors or tendencies in the visual art (Van Gogh, Matisse, Picasso, Modigliani, Beckmann, Dubuffet, Orozco, Tamayo) are, according with their own words “homages” and tributes motivated by the painter’s enchanted gaze before the works that have attracted him throughout time.

In an unforgettable declaration of principles, Victor Hugo Perez, has publicly expressed the nucleus of his pictorial discourse, the origin of his creativity and the principle of his personal sensitivity: at the unconscious level, at the subjectivity sphere, in a way of existential shadow; a “tremendous dog” dwells in his body, an image that is a beautiful simile to give account, analogically and poetically, of the artist’s deep self The figure of the dog/I the ferocious, fed throughout the vital time with resentments, humiliations, affronts, fears, powers and hopes, is the original mental model from which derives the accumulation of visions that appear in Victor Hugo’s works.

The vast production of Victor Hugo Perez, covering the field of painting, sculpture and drawing represents a contemporary Mexican development of a historical process, wider, that started during the international Leading-edge of the 1907-1930 period and which continued in the global art after 1945, spiritually marked by the devastating events of the Second World War. Such process if that of the imperative of new images representing, visually, the human figure and objects of the world. Since then and up to this time, many artists have tried to create bio-forms and anthropometries that can depict, in an advanced manner, the image and the experience of man within the context of current reality.

In the selection of work done for the exhibition documented by this book-catalog, the series of paintings produced by the artist in this year draws attention in a strong manner. It is about a sequence of paintings in which Victor Hugo Perez presented his usual discourse at a very strong precision level. In these recent works compositions predominate with the  figuration of a narrative confronting and gathering certain female archetypes, with the painter’s favorite animals: cats, dogs, birds, insects and chimeras. The characters appearing in the paintings are from contemporary women, visible in a kind of sensualized domestic space up to those coming from the mythology such as Lilith and Eve or those that are prototypes like the timeless nude woman.

Women and Animalia coexist within imagination in which both kingdoms fight and reconcile, where the story of the ardour of a love affair is told as well as that of the fear of disaffection. In the most suggestive paintings, Victor Hugo Perez recuperates in a marvelous way some immemorial stories: Lilith, in trance, is once again the promoter of freedom and unconsciousness, a lady of the beasts or a wild virgin such as Durga, Cibeles and Artemis; while Eve “the mother of all living beings”, just like the esoteric meaning of her name indicates, continues transmitting the stigma of her acts to the identity of animals from Eden fallen onto those where she projects herself. In the tireless and fabled imagination of Victor Hugo Perez, birds are the symbol of the soul, felines of the inevitable, the dogs of sentiments and the feminine-in-that-of- animals, a metaphor of powers of instinct.

The plastic dystopias created by Victor Hugo Perez, which are not exempt from warm, humoristic and affirmative scenes, offer an obscene refinement in which homeomorphism (policy and procedures of figuration that alters and deforms –without cancelling the possibility of identification– the appearance of beings and things) reaches very interesting levels. Painting consecrated to the earthly, to the impulse, to carnality and to emotional paroxysm. The production of Victor Hugo Perez reflects an artistic pathway of two and a half decades, an exercise of creative force that can be interpreted in many ways, but never has a product of casualty.