Fluids and Footprints

VÍCTOR VÁZQUEZ / Identity, body and memory (By Alicia Candiani)

Liquids and Footprints is the exhibition of photographs taken by Víctor Vázquez that is currently exhibited in the Polyglot Room of the Proyecto ´ace house. During the artist’s stay in Buenos Aires, this project was developed, and it involves -as its name indicates- a series of works that talk about body fluids (semen , feces, blood, milk), the receptacles that collect them and the candles that give light to these fluids. From a deep poetic vision, Víctor Vázquez considers the body as a place destined to flow, leaving traces, symptoms, frayed scenes as in a dream, that move us and transport us to another place; in the pages of an open blank book, of a path to walk, of an egg to break, of a tattoo to engrave … a body, in short, that lives, that flows for death and that is its corporeality .

Born in Puerto Rico in 1950, the artist is currently living between San Juan de Puerto Rico and Paris. In the 1980s, like many Puerto Ricans, he lived and studied in New York City, where he completed a doctorate in comparative religions that also led him to travel through India, China and Japan. If we add to his condition of nomadic artist, the fact that he belongs to a country that has political status as an Associated State to the United States but with its own geography, language and culture, and it is immersed in the heat of the Caribbean, we should not be surprised to see in his work “a neurotic imperative” to produce a discourse that speaks of personal and collective identities, of Caribbean syncretism and as a corollary, of cultural survival. The poetic and particular way in which these problems are articulated in his works and in his narrative about the body, have made him -without doubt- one of the most interesting artists that emerged from the artistic environment of Puerto Rico in recent years. This also earned him a prominent place in contemporary Latin American photography after his inclusion in “American Voices” in 1994.