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A SEARCH OF BEAUTY?

Gonzalo Eduardo Muñoz (2015)

 

Horacio Quiroz studied Graphic Design at Universidad Iberoamericana. He then worked as Art Director at reknowned advertising agencies for several years until he decided to dedicate entirely to art.

 

From a very young age, Horacio became passionate for drawing, a discipline which eventually would be central to his full body of work. While friends played football, he filled notebook after notebook with drawings that piled under his bed.Drawing, with all of its laberinths, its cleverness and its traps, which he managed to master, is nowadays one of his most powerful tools.  

 

After experimenting with different techniques ranging from charcoal to pastels, he ended up adopting oil painting as his favorite working material, due to its versatility and texture which allow him to express his relentless visual world.

Drawing and painting, are two elements that tense one another through his body of work; the brutal and sardonic qualities of drawing on the one side and the organic sensuality of oil on the other.

 

Attracted by the human figure and its defigurement, Horacio seems to be the builder of impossible anatomies, filled, however, with sexuality, pain and, without a doubt, humor. Not dark humor but flesh colored humor.

Knotted skin, the body which melts in itself, the hairs, the teeth, are all part of a topology in which bodies are reflected countermade. Portraits, self portraits, mutilations, ensambles, fusions that are sometimes playful, sometimes pornographic and sometimes painful, and yet they are always surprising and unexpected. Nothing painted by Horacio can be described with words; in that sense, it’s pure painting. And, in addition to being untranslateable to a linear language, it seems to be in constant motion. It is –escencially- a powerful and original look. That is, maybe, the reason for the theme of the eyes looking from the bodies; it’s repetitive, they look at us looking. Because they know perferctly well that we had never see bodies like these. Because it’s the look that makes this painting so powerful, the spectator’s look and the painter’s look, looking at those that look at what he does.

 

It’s also the representation of an ancient duality, the flesh is the body and the eyes the soul. That, only represented in an ironic tone. Sometimes it could remind us of “The History of the Eye” by George Bataille. It did to me.

A search for beauty? No doubt, a search for an idea of beauty that has to do with the body in its most tense depictions, with the body in its extremes, with the body on the brink of defleshing or completely butchered.

 

Internal panic, accumulated tension, fear, it all becomes an agonic nature, it’s neither dead nature nor representation, what Horacio does is a glorious reenactment of the corporal, of that which is human in its naught degree. The human that is inside and outside at the same time, not interior or exterior, not soul or body, just one, beautiful and horrible, sensual piece of flesh.

 

“When I paint, I connect with my interior, it’s in those small instances when I acquire consciousness of my strength and vitality; these are moments of extreme concentration and, in the end, of peace”.

 

MATERIALIZATION OF RADIOGRAPHS 

Emireth Herrera (2013)

 

Horacio Quiroz´s work reflects his search for strength, developing an energetic tenacity that seals holes and revives emotions due to his self-consciousness. No doubt, this is an artist who is characterized for his freshness and interest in exploring the human body as a receptive cabin of emotions and the ability to transform himself through catalyst impulses that are activated while feeling and living an experience. 

 

The challenge of self-exploration and manipulation of feelings have become a fundamental part of the artist´s pieces, now that he has emerged through a personal process, which has also been therapeutic. 

 

The context of the artist reveals a showcase that presents emotions which take shape by coming out and wrapping his privacy, so that the artist has found an interpretive tone constructed from a speech related to the story built by each individual since his birth, at the first contact with world. On the other hand, the artist considers the adult world shapes the mind of a child, whose emotions are conditioned as he grows, this way they become twisted. 

 

How many emotional questions, unresolved problems, intimate interrogations are not sheltered in the depths of the existence? Horacio has made radiographs o these circumstances, especially of those that cannot be told with words and only through drawing and painting can be diluted to be interpreted. 

Body and skin are presented in a catharsis evoking the spirit to emerge offering an opening lecture full of dense meaning about the artist´s personal life and the process he has been through; this is how the images project a profound impact on those who look at them. 

 

His work demonstrates that confrontation is activated between the interaction point and the adaptation to the adult world finding a definition ranging from vulnerability and courage to follow his path. Therefore, it becomes a devotion to artistic practice as a medium to take out accumulated content through his experiences.

EL PESO DE LO INMATERIAL

The Weight of the Immaterial 

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In the fractured terrain of contemporaneity, where the boundaries between the organic and the digital dissolve, we finally understand that identity is not inheritance but invention¹, not destiny but becoming, a space of struggle and reinvention, where every transformation is an act of resistance and hybridity constitutes the most authentic form of contemporary being. 

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In `El peso de lo inmaterial´, Horacio Quiroz constructs a myth for our time, a posthumanist project where spirituality, artificial intelligence, painting, and the self converge in that liminal territory where the impossible takes on tangible form. 

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The exhibition rests on the paradox that the invisible exerts force upon the visible, transforming absence into a presence that reshapes our understanding of existence. Behind appearances lies the transcendent², and it is in that realm where the concept of ontological weight³ unfolds its full power: being acquires material density precisely through what remains hidden. 

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From that invisible density of being, the works take form as cyborg subjects, mestizo configurations that understand hybridity as the essence of the contemporary subject. These creatures do not dwell on the margins; they occupy the center of a new narrative about what it means to have a body, consciousness, and desire in the 21st century. They dissolve the boundaries between the human condition and the machine, moving through a landscape where traditional taxonomies prove insufficient. 

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But these forms are not merely aesthetic or technological combinations; they reflect a process of inner transformation, a gesture of opening toward the void from which something new may be born. Horacio Quiroz understands that every time an algorithm generates an image, or artificial intelligence composes a text, it activates the psychic echo of the one who once imagined that path. There is no artwork without subjective presence, creation becomes an almost ritual act, channeling the archetypes that inhabit the collective unconscious of our time. 

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In `El peso de lo inmaterial´, the boundaries between body, mind, and identity dissolve. The posthuman artist creates protean bodies, fusing flesh with stone, clay, and liquid metal, defying binary dualities and flowing with the intersexual freedom of one who never asked for permission to exist. Painting becomes a privileged space where the invisible takes form, where the intangible incarnates with weight and gravity. 

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This cosmic fertility resists all forms of domestication and marks the threshold of a posthuman individuation: a space where ancient archetypes are reborn in new forms, the digital shadow, the algorithmic anima, the cyborg self and where psyche transforms into code, and code becomes soul. Thus, `El peso de lo inmaterial´, reveals that the invisible is the true substance of the contemporary self. 

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Victoria Rivers Curator and writer 

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¹ Donna J. Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century, in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (Madrid: Cátedra, 1995). ² Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2005). ³ Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. José Gaos (Madrid: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2003); and The Origin of the Work of Art, in Paths that Lead Nowhere (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 2001). 

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