JAVIER VÁZQUEZ — LOST STORIES
OPENING THURSDAY 12 MARCH 2020, 20.00H.
Exhibition from March 12 to June 25
As if they were the scattered paragraphs of a Cortázar story, Javier Vázquez’s drawings contain the full force of secrets. On their lines, sharp and hard, they could challenge the funambulists fear, and also throw some questions to us, that we always return to look at them with the confidence of completing the missing parts of the narration. Poor dreamers!
In the pages of his notebooks there are characters whom one thinks he has seen on more than one occasion, perhaps in the subway or in the grocery store, and even in the bar that nobody knows we frequent when we get sad. From the paper they sometimes wink at us, tell us a gracieta or whisper an obscenity. We never know if they are laughing at us or looking at us with tenderness, but whatever they do or are going to do these mysterious beings is as unintelligible as it is beautiful, like a beautiful dawn that we stumble upon by surprise in any vulgar place.
Javier Vázquez belongs to a genealogy of artists who transmit the heartbeat of life in each movement of the pencil, and it doesn’t matter if he draws a stool or a jazz singer. In his work is the drive of Egon Schiele, the humor of Otto Dix, the irreverence of Goya. He has illustrated stories for children in Steamboat and stories for adults in Madriz, but what goes through the author’s entire work is an awkward truth, that none of us can ever reconstruct the story that his illustrations are a handful of paragraphs loose and in disarray.
For all the above, when we refer to Javier Vázquez, instead of talking about illustration, that is, to give light to understanding, we could talk about concealment, leave in mystery. In my opinion, it is much more interesting, since each of his drawings is a secret, an enigma, which allows us to have faith in something, everyone will know what. And this is only achieved by the great artists, the true creators, with whose work we always become dumbfounded.
By Ignacio Vleming
