A LOS ANIMALES LOS MATA EL SOL
Erick Víquez
June, 2026
Erick Víquez
June, 2026
Erick Víquez (b. Cartago, Costa Rica, 1993) is a painter whose practice draws from landscape, literature, and art history to explore memory, time, and the gothic dimensions of Latin American culture. Referencing historical and personal archives, popular culture, and vernacular histories, his work reflects a deep interest in the colonial and violent narratives embedded within the region’s past. His images of domestic settings and tropical environments are haunting and ambiguous spaces where familiarity collapses and the unsettling seeps into the everyday. Through visual explorations of the rural, Víquez paints a rural world after expulsion: sparse, weathered, held at a distance.
In A Los Animales los Mata el Sol (Animals Die in the Sun), Víquez presents twenty new oil paintings and drawings. The exhibition moves through rural tropics where light has already given way: a landscape of crepuscular light and lateral heat, where the atmosphere itself carries a pressure without origin or event, something the space holds as an intrinsic condition.
The exhibition takes its title from El Jaúl (1937) by Costa Rican writer Max Jiménez. Though rarely discussed within the context of the gothic, Jiménez occupies an important place in Víquez’s constellation of tropical gothic references. Through its demystification of the campesino and its unsentimental portrayal of rural life, El Jaúl challenged idealized narratives of the Costa Rican countryside. Víquez’s paintings continue this gesture, presenting the tropics not as sites of abundance or escape, but as psychologically charged landscapes shaped by estrangement, violence, and historical tension.
Víquez’s work aligns with a broader lineage of Latin American artists who have resisted the exoticized expectations historically imposed upon tropical landscapes. Like Armando Morales, José Bedia, and Wifredo Lam before him, he reimagines the landscape as psychologically complex and haunted, where lushness and unease coexist. His paintings challenge the “tropical picturesque,” revealing instead an atmosphere where memory, mythology, and social histories converge.
Víquez has also served as the Editorial Director for Libros Humildes, as a research assistant for the Central American Print Collection at the University of Costa Rica, and as a guest lecturer at the School of Architecture (UCR). His work has been exhibited in Costa Rica, Chile, London, Los Angeles, including at Galería deCERCA, Salita Temporal, and Hannah Sloan Gallery. His work is held in private collections across Bogotá, Panama City, Mexico City, Los Angeles, London, and the Republic of Korea.
In A Los Animales los Mata el Sol (Animals Die in the Sun), Víquez presents twenty new oil paintings and drawings. The exhibition moves through rural tropics where light has already given way: a landscape of crepuscular light and lateral heat, where the atmosphere itself carries a pressure without origin or event, something the space holds as an intrinsic condition.
The exhibition takes its title from El Jaúl (1937) by Costa Rican writer Max Jiménez. Though rarely discussed within the context of the gothic, Jiménez occupies an important place in Víquez’s constellation of tropical gothic references. Through its demystification of the campesino and its unsentimental portrayal of rural life, El Jaúl challenged idealized narratives of the Costa Rican countryside. Víquez’s paintings continue this gesture, presenting the tropics not as sites of abundance or escape, but as psychologically charged landscapes shaped by estrangement, violence, and historical tension.
Víquez’s work aligns with a broader lineage of Latin American artists who have resisted the exoticized expectations historically imposed upon tropical landscapes. Like Armando Morales, José Bedia, and Wifredo Lam before him, he reimagines the landscape as psychologically complex and haunted, where lushness and unease coexist. His paintings challenge the “tropical picturesque,” revealing instead an atmosphere where memory, mythology, and social histories converge.
Víquez has also served as the Editorial Director for Libros Humildes, as a research assistant for the Central American Print Collection at the University of Costa Rica, and as a guest lecturer at the School of Architecture (UCR). His work has been exhibited in Costa Rica, Chile, London, Los Angeles, including at Galería deCERCA, Salita Temporal, and Hannah Sloan Gallery. His work is held in private collections across Bogotá, Panama City, Mexico City, Los Angeles, London, and the Republic of Korea.