At the opening of the exhibition two weeks ago, Victor’s artwork magically attracted visitors. A bright, accessible altar, a meeting place for the living and their muertitos, their loved ones who have died. The side walls of the altar were covered with tissue paper and covered with large stylized hearts and hummingbirds. Hummingbirds are the messengers of love and symbolize here the love that survives death, the love between the living and the dead. It seemed to work, the visitors of the vernissage liked to be in this hall, they called their dead and willingly took selfies. It even seemed to me that I met my mother, who nodded briefly but kindly.
“This is a completely new stage in your work,” exclaimed the curator. “Completely different than usual, more modern, more open.”
“It’s so bright, so friendly,” visitors said.
“This altar makes me happy.”
“Well,” Victor replied casually. “That’s because I can hardly see anything!”
His left eye is stricken with rare cancer and has undergone chemotherapy. Two weeks before this vernissage, he also suffered from unilateral facial paralysis. Since the affected eye—in this case, the right, “good” eye—cannot blink, it is highly irritated. “Like a knife to the head.” (Don’t worry, both issues are under control or being fixed in the meantime.)
Under such circumstances, I would probably cancel the exhibition. Not Victor. “We have come this far,” he said. “I worked in the worst conditions.” While we were still sitting on uncomfortable plastic chairs in the waiting room, he took out an album and tried to draw. He wanted to evaluate what else was there and what was not. He couldn’t do the detailed, layered silhouettes he’s known for, it quickly became clear. Instead, he drew simple patterns on cardboard, which I cut out of thick layers of tissue paper with a Japanese knife.
I immediately liked these simple openwork hearts. There was something open, friendly, almost childish about them. And I thought about a movie I saw on a plane a few years ago, about the artist Matisse, who was too weak to paint after a serious illness, and instead lay in bed cutting out simple shapes from colored paper and gluing them together. At that time, the art world laughed at him, but his silhouettes not only survived, but are known throughout the world. The indomitable joy of life they convey cannot be suppressed. It’s the same with Victor’s altar.
At first I tried to hold him back when he explained his process in terms of his state of health. “People don’t need to know about this,” I muttered. As if the fact that this new imagery was born out of necessity would devalue his work. And I wondered if he himself felt this as an emergency decision, and not a voluntary and deliberate decision.
Against. “Until now, all the obstacles and obstacles have helped me,” Victor said. “Every perceived failure pushed me in a direction I hadn’t even thought about.” And you should know it. “Maybe it will help someone.”
Yes, for example.