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BiographyERICK VÍQUEZ1993. Cartago, Costa RicaErick Víquez (b. 1993, Cartago, Costa Rica) is a painter whose work draws upon photographic archives, literature, and the visual culture of Central America. Working primarily from vernacular images — often domestic photographs from mid-twentieth-century Costa Rica — he explores the tensions already embedded within representations of rural life, landscape, and loss. Through processes of accumulation, editing, and reduction, these source materials are transformed into paintings that maintain a deliberate distance from their origins, allowing the image to operate as a site of silence rather than record.

Central to Víquez’s practice is an interest in the rural as a space of ambiguity rather than nostalgia. His paintings frequently depict landscapes and domestic environments marked by silence, absence, and psychological tension, foregrounding relationships between body, labor, climate, and history. In this context, the tropical gothic emerges not as a fixed aesthetic category but as a mode of inquiry through which the artist examines excess, estrangement, and the material conditions of life in the tropics.

Alongside his studio practice, Víquez has worked extensively across publishing and research. He served as Editorial Director of 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 of the University of Costa Rica (UCR).

His work has been exhibited internationally in Costa Rica, Chile, London, Los Angeles, and Miami, including at Galería deCERCA, Salita Temporal, and Hannah Sloan Gallery. His paintings are held in private collections across Bogotá, Panama City, Mexico City, Los Angeles, London, and the Republic of Korea.


[Work Catalogue]