Towards the end of 2014 I had the chance to interview artist Irving Vera Chirino, who currently lives in Mexico (…) Conversation initially turned to the group show Viáticos (Viaticums, 2014), held in Mexico City as a project by specialist Luis Ramaggio. (…)Later the conversation began to move towards much more general aspects of visual arts. (…)
Generationally, your group has been reproached a distancing on the social debate that had played such an important role, with various nuances, in the eighties and even the nineties. (…)
I do not see myself as a person evading reality with my work. In fact, I try to be connected with it. Inner reality is as real as the outer one and it is fundamental to pay attention to it. On the other hand, I do not see uprooting or disconnection with reality in the productions you mention, much less evasion. That would be taking things very literally.
The control we tried to challenge—and this we share with Orestes, El Pollo, Campins and others—was the excess of theoretical conceptualization and justification intending to pedagogically impose itself at that time in the High Institute of Arts, having to base your work in a perfectly rational, logical, explainable discourse. (…)
Let’s go back for a moment to Viáticos and then talk about your series Emociones técnicas (Technical Emotions), made of decisively abstract pieces.. (…)
Some topics have vanished from my career and abstraction has emerged. I did not make abstraction in Cuba and did not imagine that I would once do it, although language synthesis was always close to me (…). Emociones técnicas researches the possibilities of drawing taken to its minimal expression: a study of the operatory logics during the act of drawing, attention to the concrete possibilities of the material, the tool and the support; attention to the mental flow, to the material of memory itself, to the body. I start from the fascination on the fact that actions determined by a quasimathematical structure, and purely “technical,” may convey a strong philosophical, existential and poetical connotation. (…)
