Erick Víquez
Erick Víquez (Cartago, Costa Rica, 1993) is a painter whose practice is grounded in the mythopoetic through observations of landscape, literature, and art history. Much of his work focuses on the nature of memory and time, referencing historical and personal archives, popular culture, and literature, to reflect his deep interest in the gothic, colonial, and violent narratives of Latin American history and culture. His images of domestic settings, both historical and contemporary, as well as the rural and tropical environment of the province in which he was raised, are haunting and ambiguous spaces where familiarity collapses and the disturbing seeps into the everyday. His visual explorations of the jungle, the suffocating heat of the tropics, and social violence then and now, are expressions of a regionally specific gothic, where tropical exuberance coexists with darkness and repression.
Erick Víquez, Sin título, 2023, oil on panel, 65 x 85 cm
Víquez is Editorial Director for Libros Humildes, where he conducts editorial research on the translation and transcription of literary texts, and Technical Editor for Flores Artificiales, where he conducts artistic research on technical editing and contemporary binding structures and formats. He has served as a research assistant for the Central American Print Collection at the University of Costa Rica and a guest lecturer at the School of Architecture (UCR). His work has been exhibited at Galeria deCERCA and Salita Temporal in San José, Costa Rica, where he was Artist-in-Residence in 2022.
Erick Víquez , Sin Título, 2024, oil on archival paper, overall: 35 1/4 x 33 1/8 inches ; 12 individual panels at 11.5 x 8.25 inches each
“This open space of ambiguity and reinterpretation is central to understanding how the unsettling arises not solely from the supernatural but from reality itself, from the interplay of memory, history, and landscape. This sublimation of the strange is manifested in the lack of a defined center, in the sensation of placelessness that characterizes much of my interests.
The jungle, the sugarcane fields, and the surrounding tropical nature become active forces that encircle and threaten, blurring the distinctions between inside and outside. This spatial ambiguity reinforces the feeling of displacement, where boundaries dissolve and a sort of ritual in chaos emerges.”
- Erick Víquez
Featured Works
