Perspectivas Contrasantes
A Sketch About Perspectivas Contrastantes
by L. M. Apache
Editor, Critical Bone
The creator of these striking single panel Black & White images is Victor R. Rivas, a self described “migrating citizen of the Americas” currently tripping in a metropolitan setting somewhere in El Norte. As a politically engaged artist, Rivas explores expressions of transitory being, where real experiences of accessability, acculturation, appropriation, cultural hybridity, and transculturation become manifest in the commonality of everyday living.
The Perspectivas Contrastantes are loosely inspired on themes explored in the Tripticos. They are, the artist jokeingly explains, “boxed-in sketches smack dab in the middle of an ordinary sheet of paper.” Indeed, the images of Perspectivas contrastantes are high-contrast images drawn swiftly with the thickest of broad tipped black markers on the most common letter sized white bond paper. Yet, they are much more than just “boxed-in sketches.” They are critical realizations of imagined cultural instances crudely framed as self referential abstractions within the ubiquitous context of Eurocentric aesthetics.
The Perspectivas Contrastantes were literally created out of chaos. Out of a protracted panic and eventual urgent necessity to react against a paradoxically palpable nothingness. “A nothingness,” explains Rivas, “threatening to obscure my standard sense of the world by slowly, but surely, first fragmenting, then blurring, and finally erratically erasing bits and pieces of what is normally considered the visible.” Rather than allow a diminished perception of the world due to his neutralized ability for fully perceiving the privileged visible, the artist continues to creatively expand his worldview. Rivas justifies his optimism, “experiencing my shifting sensory realities is, actually, an on-going adventure. It has been bumpy and rough at times, and I’ve often recklessly crashed, but it is also revealing the beauty and bounty of the invisible and, now that I’ve sensed Hope, I am no longer fearful of nothingness.” The complex simplicity of the black & white images that make up the Perspectivas Contrastantes belie conventional perspectives of the known world. Each image represents, like the artist, visible proof that reveals in stark contrasts the realities of possible expression against assumed impossibilities generated by stereotypical notions of what constitutes true vision.
