AN ARTIST OF OUR TIME

The trajectory of Víctor Zúñiga Aedo is broad in cartography and chronology. He was the first winner of the Concurso de Arte de Fundación Telefónica del Perú (Telephony Foundation of Perú Art Competition) in 1997. He is now Research Professor at the Universidad Nacional Diego Quispe Tito, in Cusco. Between these two points, his career exemplifies a path for anyone who wants to remain active in the construction of contemporary art as a field of knowledge currently. Zúñiga is among those who have found a place in the field of academics, in updating artistic education.

Víctor Zúñiga belongs to the lineage of the restless visual artist by nature, and is untiring in his constant reapproaches within a creative process that has known multiple stages, of which only a few were ever presented in Lima gallery spaces in more than 25 years. Even so, Zúñiga has been a spanning artist between Cusco and Lima throughout this time. This without making any concessions anywhere. His years of travels, studies, and residence, on a European journey, left him a taste for art that extends and resumes in the questions he formulates.

It was painting that made him known in Lima, but from that first moment, in the mid-1990s, he has always made use of a variety of media in his creations. Now, at the stage of his first artistic maturity, he presents a series of works that are reflections concentrating on ephemeral artistic practices.

On the one hand, his current creation comprises a dialogue with art itself, and with what it implies to have an artistic vision, and a perspective on the art of the time during which he has lived in Peru. He concentrates on the revision of visual archives generated by artists, which operate significantly in his imaginary and in his own practice as a contemporary artist. Thus, he looks at his own generation with attention, in an act marked by a wide breadth of vision and a basic recognition of that which has been built.

On the other hand, he is lavish with ephemeral works, and resorts to installation, intervention, and action. In a certain sense, this is also working with time, but through minimal gestures that can impregnate the imagination and last longer than expected. Even beyond what is desired. Zúñiga aligns himself with those who leave traces that are picked up by attentive and keen eyes, that wade through the torrents that sweep away memories of all kinds.

Cusco and the everyday life of Cusco also fit into the proposal, but in the horizon of Zúñiga they are incorporated as so many other signs with various equivalences. There is something strangely enigmatic in the transiency that Zúñiga proposes as the core of this art. This maybe the product of the current mood, which is territorial and political. That something is present now. And it is not inconsequential.

Jorge Villacorta Chávez