"Most of my work bears on a few obsessions : the inevitability of Death and the oppressiveness of a lifelong battle with depression. The burden of living in an incomprehensible universe also figures in my troubled psyche. What is the meaning of existence? Fortunately, I never feel forsaken with the beauty of Nature and the vigorous spirit of the paintbrush."- Selene Vasquez
Excerpts from critical reviews:
SELENE VASQUEZ is a "mad scientist of the canvas." She floats her depictions of human heads on backgrounds of intense color. She insists she's not a portrait painter: "I make heads. The reproduction of features is an almost superficial task and I maintain a minimal allegiance to realism. What I favor is distortion in the brushstroke and a pallet of forceful colors to probe the interior."
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These haunted looking faces with minimal details conjure up a bleak vision of the human condition. In terms of actual technique, Vasquez creates texture by raking the surface of the painted canvas with a menagerie of objects. She treats the the canvas like a piece of stone, carving away at the black gessoed exterior. "My work has a deliberate crudity," Vasquez warns. "It's rough and I take it to the edge of sanity without falling over." As sharp with her rhetoric, she taunts the viewer to stand gazing at that edge.
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Like the stylized squiggles used to convey sensations in comics, her radiating lines suggest tension, anxiety and pain. Her backgrounds are bold and deliberately chaotic: "It's representative of Life crashing in on the individual and the stamina of the human being to endure." she asserts.
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A "virtuoso" at using skeletal faces to capture extreme states of emotion or, more commonly, neuroses, she is far less interested in how someone looks than how to use human features to suggest various emotional and mental states- thereby an heir to classic expressionism.
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But can Vasquez live up to her mystique as a haunted, cataclysmic artist?
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Excerpts taken from "Once More with Feeling," New Times Broward, 8/23/07; "Haunting Exhibit Shows the Sweet Hell Within," Eastsider, 6/23/06; "Artbeat: Powerful One Woman Show," New Times Broward, 6/11/05; "In No Strange Land: Local Librarian Adds Pages To Life and Creates Emotional Art," Eastsider, 6/23/05.
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