Gabinet. Marcelo Viquez: Riesgo necesario

Marcelo Viquez (Montevideo, 1971) presents for the Nit del Art a project entitled Riesgo necesario (necessary risk). A piece that derivates in different actions and which is an approached from the sobriety of gesture and effectiveness of the installation and drawing. A metaphor that shows more than it reveals in appearance.

The action made in El Corte Inglés will be a surprising act, intelligent and effective that won’t leave anyone indifferent, while the work exhibited in Es Baluard’s Gabinet will decode some of its main keys.

This is the third edition El Corte Inglés and Es Baluard collaborate together in the production of a project placed in both spaces –El Corte Inglés storefront and Es Baluard’s Gabinet- where artists belonging to the collection are invited to develop a proposal of rational art. The two previous editions were made by Alicia Framis (2012) and Amparo Sard (2013).

Marcelo Viquez is an out-of-format artist, he changes his tools and devices, alterning them, passing indistinctly from drawing to installation, video, music performance or readymade. In his work, even in the most conceptual projects, underlies a nonstop narration as radiography of the surrounding and of what everyone thinks and feels without any concession.

We could mark that prospection between outside and inside, individual and society, is one of the questions which, in the first instance, distinguishes Marcelo Viquez work, keeping a political structural relation in all his projects. When his work demonstrates the other, the skeptic and nihilist attitude opposing a world immersed in the chaos of rules, structures and lies place us in unreality. Appearances in the world of fragile, when it has not a determinate direction, recall those ideas launched by Zygmunt Bauman. Thus, we feel –upon Bauman in Liquid Life- that «Los dilemas y las incertidumbres que las sociedades diseñan para sus miembros suelen venir acompañados de estrategias y herramientas para su resolución socialmente respaldadas y recomendadas». ¹

In this world, its inhabitants are pressed to trace their surviving strategies and thus, when Viquez conceives the proposal on the individual, does it thinking in himself, from a hermetic and corrosive ego. The critical value of art when nothing’s expected.

For this project, Viquez concentrates us in a theme that resumes some of his obsessions respect the interpersonal relations, that of trust and derivates, understood from deception versus the other and the risks one can take in every situation life make us deal with. Trust is a kind of belief or link, considered as a temporary suspension of the basic situation of uncertainty about the actions of the kindred.

With Riesgo necesario, Viquez synthesizes fragility of what we consider real and that in just a few seconds can disappear while not trying to obtain the capacity of foresee eluding events. This project both measure us an measure the fragility of what we can validate respect who predictably supported a world or a situation we considered controlled and we believed on.

Marcelo Viquez works have been exhibited in individual and collective exhibitions in the Centro Cultural Can Gelabert, Binissalem, Mallorca (2004), Centre Cultural la Misericòrdia, Palma de Mallorca (2009), Centre of Contemporary Art Andratx, Mallorca (2009), and Es Baluard Museu d’Art Modern i Contemporani de Palma (2010), Kewenig Gallery, Palma de Mallorca (2010, 2012, 2013), Kewenig Gallery, Cologne, (2011),Sala Pelaires, Palma de Mallorca (2013). He has taken part in different international fairs such as Art Basel, Art Chicago, Art Cologne and ARCO Madrid, among others. His work is present in collections like those of the Fundación Barceló, Palma de Mallorca, Ajuntament de Palma de Mallorca, Consell de Mallorca, Montana Mobler Collection, Denmark and Es Baluard Museu d’Art Modern i Contemporani de Palma.

¹ Bauman, Zygmunt. Vida líquida. Barcelona: Ediciones Paidós, 2006, pg. 37. (Dilemmas and uncertainties designed by societies for its members are usually accompanied by strategies and tools for its socially supported and recommended resolution)