The Awake Volcanoes

Sandra Vásquez de La Horra
[16 de agosto de 2023]

Desire, I want to turn into you.
Caroline Polachek, “Welcome to My Island” (2023)

Sketches, words, mountains, volcanoes, and silhouettes of human bodies recur throughout the work of Sandra Vásquez de la Horra. Her practice is known for articulate poetry and artistic experimentation in a semantic field that moves between the absurd and the affirmation of affection and pleasure. Vásquez de la Horra presented a significant group of her works at the fifty-ninth Venice Biennale, The Milk of Dreams, in 2022. In the center of the Arsenale, she created a large-scale installation called The Found Mountain Ranges. Akin to a solo exhibition, the work featured a wooden structure with niches reminiscent of a chapel’s architecture, with artworks both inside and out. The intimate details invited viewers to look closely, going against the speed and grand narratives characteristic of biennials. The artist’s interest in writing—something embedded in her work since the early 2000s—continues here but in sentences longer than the surgically precise words written earlier. The phrase that resonated most with me from this experience as a visitor was the one written on a simple piece of paper folded in three parts with an image of a dark human form against a colorful sky: “Detras de esa nube hay um OVNI” (There’s a UFO behind that cloud).

At the Biennale, writing was also present in works composed of different parts made of paper. On one of them was written “No pasarán los venceremos mi amor” (They shall not pass we will win my love); on another, “América sin fronteras” (America with no borders); and in the center of the installation, coming out of a mouth, was the phrase “La voz de un pueblo que lucha” (The voice of a nation that struggles; fig. 2). All three examples are written in Spanish. The visitor who didn’t read Spanish would undoubtedly have another understanding of the images. Why write in Spanish? In an event as international as the Venice Biennale, wouldn’t the artist’s words be more quickly understood in English or, wanting to respond to a local audience, in Italian? These questions lead to another: why not write in Spanish?

Could Vásquez de la Horra be writing in Spanish because she was born in Chile? Do these works refer to recent episodes in Chilean and Latin American history? Are her drawings and texts a response to the collective and individual traumas of the violence enacted by Pinochet?

Born in 1967 in Viña del Mar, Chile, Vásquez de la Horra lived through the entire bloody period of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorial government (1974–90). Even though the artist speaks openly about how conservative and religious her family is and how difficult it was to position herself publicly as a visual artist, her artistic production was not a direct response to the fascism she experienced. Dejected, indeed, like the entire Chilean artistic class—whether already institutionalized or a younger generation—by the repression of a fascist government, existentially and artistically, it was not in Vásquez de la Horra’s interest to create a pamphleteering response to the bloodbath.

To return to the three key sentences from the Venice installation—one that evokes the notion of “people,” another that includes the word for America next to a long mountain range, and a third that places side by side the maxims “No pasarán” (They shall not pass) and “venceremos” (We will win)—there are clear links to identity, history, and linguistics. But can’t every work of art be read via multiple interpretive layers that coexist instead of a vehement reduction to a single meaning? If Vásquez de la Horra were born in the hegemonic North that encompasses, for example, not only Western Europe but the United States, would her work appeal so much for its geographical specficity to the detriment of its universal character?

Vásquez de la Horra’s images deviate from certain stereotypes and expectations not only regarding Latin American artists but around image-makers from the Global South in general. Compared, for example, with Chilean artists of great international prominence and from different generations—such as Alfredo Jaar, Cecilia Vicuña, Jorge Tacla, and Voluspa Jarpa—her work brings mystery and a sense of nuance that is perhaps surprising given the combination of text and imagery. Remember her phrase: “There’s a UFO behind That Cloud.”

In the center of the image, with their back turned, a figure with long hair appears before what the text indicates is a cloud over which are three tiny arched stripes in yellow, orange, and red. Is this a sun setting or rising? Or do we believe the words of the artist—or the figure who could be a narrator—and bet our faith on a UFO? We’ll never know the answers. Frankly, do we need them? Vásquez de la Horra’s practice always plays in interpretive uncertainty. The apparent nonsense of her sentence leads us to complete this narrative in our imaginations and brings with it something that iconically represents her poetics.

Further complicating a strictly biographical interpretation is Vásquez de la Horra’s move to Germany in 1995. She’d completed her first academic training, in design, from the Universidad Viña del Mar in 1994. Her first works in woodcut turned to biology, specifically human fertilization through sperm and eggs. In painting, she depicted the landscapes from her travels across the different geographies of Chile. After migrating to Germany, she began to study at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, which was founded in 1762, and gradually inserted herself into the long-running culture of also teaching at the institution. She followed in the footsteps of many artist-teachers before her who also brought together notions of tradition and experimentation, such as Jannis Kounellis (Vásquez de la Horra’s own teacher), Rosemarie Trockel, Joseph Beuys, Nam June Paik, Gerhard Richter, Anselm Kiefer, Candida Höfer, and Katharina Grosse. Vásquez de la Horra was also impressed with the contemporary and classical art exhibitions and collections in the area. Suddenly, in the city itself or with quick train rides, she could visit exhibitions of major artists from Albrecht Dürer to Cy Twombly.

Vásquez de la Horra traveled back and forth between Chile and Germany during the 1990s. At the end of the decade, the artist established herself firmly in Europe and immersed herself in experimentation, a period that coincided with her pregnancy and the birth of her daughter. She participated in photography and video workshops, leading her to create animation, photo-performance, and video-performance works. She continued her studies at the Kunstakademie through 2002 and, simultaneously, completed a master’s degree at the Kunsthochschule für Medien between 2001 and 2003. She continued to live in Düsseldorf until the beginning of the 2010s, when she moved to Berlin.

Almost three decades after her first trip to Germany, even with all the obstacles faced by being an immigrant woman artist there, Vásquez de la Horra is fully integrated into the local art ecosystem due to her education in the country, her fluency in German, and her presence in the German and European art markets. More than that, she was recently awarded two of the most prestigious honors for visual artists in the country: the Hans Theo Richter Prize in 2021, presented by the Saxon Academy of Arts in Dresden, and the Käthe Kollwitz Prize in 2023, given by the Berlin Academy of Arts.

Throughout her career, since her first works in 1986, Vásquez de la Horra has used drawing and paper as her primary tools. In the 1980s she worked in engraving, in the 1990s she made drawings of the landscape, and it was during her time in Germany that the artist became interested in more fantastical images. Initially, her gaze turned to botany, and she produced a broad series of pictures with a falsely scientific nature. Concomitantly, her attention turned to a study of pregnancy and the transformations in the human body during gestation.

Stimulated by the experimentation at the German art schools where she’d studied, Vásquez de la Horra decided to apply layers of beeswax to her drawings in the second half of the 1990s. This gives her images a tone closer to cream; in the first of them, the final tones are dark. It is difficult not to see this method as an archival and temporal extension of her images. Physically and chemically, the sheets of paper are less exposed to light and degradation over time; conceptually, these objects more closely resemble anachronistic compositions due to their sepia layers. Finally, besides the wax emanating a discrete smell, which is noticeable in some of her works, its organic nature creates a semantic connection with one of the most constant topics in the artist’s work: the possible symbiosis between the human body and nature, far beyond any binarism.

During the 2010s, always looking for new paths in her practice, Vásquez de la Horra started using the same sheets of paper dipped in wax to take her work off the walls; these surfaces became the sides of miniature houses, small sets, human bodies, and mountains shown in an accordion-like format. With that, her work grew not only in scale but in its conversation with architecture. These object-drawings can even be displayed on furniture designed by the artist. Once inside an exhibition of hers, as well exemplified at the Venice Biennale, one needs a more active approach to art viewing, especially with her preference for her works to be hung at different heights.

Despite all my words here, the reader may wonder why Vásquez de la Horra is so fixated on drawing. Let’s turn to one of the first anecdotes in Western art history. The story of Kora, the daughter of a potter named Butades of Sicyon, is recounted in book XXXV of Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, published between 77 and 79 CE. In love with a young man who is leaving the country, Kora decides, with the help of a lamp, to outline his shadow on the wall. To preserve the memory of his daughter’s lover, her father transforms the outline into a portrait in clay, which he later casts into a ceramic piece. The origin of drawing, therefore, would be affection—more than that, love.

If we think about our childhood memories, for many of us it was through drawing that we expressed different sensations and experimented with the composition of images. Through it, we learned to write; let us not forget that words, regardless of our alphabets, are drawings. Many of us carry this interest in drawing through to adulthood; it is how we often distract ourselves, through animated series and films or to avoid the boredom of meetings. Drawing, considered within the history of fine arts the father of architecture, sculpture, and painting, is possibly the artistic language that all of us— since the cave drawings of Lascaux—have worked with at some point in our lives.

Therefore, Vásquez de la Horra’s insistence on deepening her uses and knowledge around drawing is not a coincidence. Dealing with subjects as intimate and existential as the celebration of life, the fear of death, transcendence, the polysemy of words, the cycles of nature, domesticity, and the absurdity and diversity of human bodies, would there be a language as generous, flexible, and to which nearly anyone can establish some relationship—even if it is through disgust—as drawing?

It is as the artist herself writes next to a drawing of hers from 1992 and gives the title to this publication and exhibition: “los volcanes despiertos” (the awake volcanoes. Drawing is constantly walking on the edge of a volcano awakened but not necessarily erupting. Drawing is waging a battle—without winners—with our desires, pleasures, and traumas. That’s what makes us so curious about that suggested UFO hidden behind a cloud—each of us will complete its silhouette in a way, and some will even claim that it is a mistake.

May the work of Sandra Vásquez de la Horra make us realize how the ancient technique of drawing continues to allow artists to build solid, inventive, and experimental careers in the visual arts. We look at her images and surrender to their details; when it comes to desire, we are not afraid to, if necessary, dive into the depths of the lava of a volcano.

“Late un fuego allí dentro” (“There’s a fire that beats within”)

In a small panoramic landscape drawing made in 1992, below the erupting volcano on the right, Sandra Vásquez de la Horra wrote, “Late un fuego allí dentro” (A fire beats within. The phrase goes beyond merely describing the volcano, it refers to human nature—but could we not expand these words to other series of her works?

During the first half of the 1990s, especially in 1992 and ’93, Vásquez de la Horra traveled to different regions of Chile. Through small-scale drawings on paper and a series of oil paintings on canvas, she created images that demonstrate her interest in a relationship with time that is closely tied to the cycles of nature. In the titles of these works, the artist refers to the peculiar geography in the territory we call Chile today. The Atacama Desert appears several times, including through imagery of the Valle de la Luna and the city of San Pedro, and makes an arid contrast with snowy Valle Nevado, Peñuelas Lake, rugged Cerro Mauco, and temperate Chiloé Island.

Far from any attempt to faithfully represent such different ecosystems, these images are expressive experiments with color, in addition to one of her few forays into painting. In some, the mountainous landscapes are accompanied by silhouettes of planes and communication towers. These spaces that seem paradisiacal and even romantic are not isolated and protected; in fact, they only exist in correlation with humanity.

The hills that appear in these images evoke a mountain range, a motif associated not only with Chile’s Andes Mountains but with geographies as different as those of Nepal (Himalayas), Switzerland (Alps), and even the United States and Denver (Rocky Mountains). In the artist’s most recent works, however, this association always takes place explicitly within the human body; the silhouette of a reclining body can be related to the outline of a concentration of rocky angles.

Imagery of bodies and landscapes in Las cordilleras encontradas (The Found Mountain Ranges), La amortajada (The Shrouded Woman), Volcánicas (The Volcanic Women), and Entre las cordilleras (Between the Mountain Ranges) takes different forms—including drawings on paper folded like accordions or presented in the shape of a house. Some mountain peaks feature wisps of escaping smoke. More than mere mountains, to evoke the title of that 1992 drawing, “a fire beats within.”

From the stillness of an icy mountain and the supposed rational control of the human psyche, there is a pathos of desire about to explode. This is one of the many ways the artist deals with the idea of desire in her research and iconography. Within all of us, within every mountain, there is the potential for a volcano. Whether it awakens is just a matter of time.

“Botánica de la evolución” (“Evolutionary botanics”)

In Sandra Vásquez de la Horra’s first artworks, drypoint engravings produced in the mid-1980s, spermatozoa on their journey to an ovum evoke the notion of fertilization. The intense scratches made by the artist’s hands oscillate between representing a scene full of movement and experimenting with the element of abstraction.

Vásquez de la Horra’s interest in the human body and how it dialogues with visual cultures from the scientific field reappears in her practice about ten years later, in a series that juxtaposes human and plant bodies made in the second half of the 1990s. Here, for the first time, she dips her drawings in beeswax, giving the paper a sculptural and organic finish.

The drawings of invented peppers, lilies, cacao, and species from an encounter between tubers and orchids echo botanical drawing boards from the nineteenth century. Vásquez de la Horra’s cross-sections and anatomical studies of these fictitious plants evoke interesting formal relationships. Silhouettes of human heads and contours that may refer to, for example, human organs relate the diversities of the human body with these plants.

These head shapes resemble those in another series of works Vásquez de la Horra produced in the mid-1990s, Symbiosis. In these images, human skulls, heads, and torsos are surgically connected in different ways—morphing with televisions, stacked upon each other, or oriented to the cardinal points. If the works mentioned in the previous paragraph are directly related to the study of botany, these investigate human anatomy. Similar interest is noted in a cycle of paintings from 1997, where human torsos are presented like those in medical illustrations. In one work, the artist even points out the different organs in cursive lettering. However, an attentive viewer will quickly discern that these are fictions of the human body, that the artist has invented arrangements, shapes, and colors for organs that are mere forms painted on the surface of a canvas.

Another series from the same year focuses on unborn fetuses, one of her most potent image sequences. The silhouettes of human bodies in different stages of gestation are drawn on paper, and, as she did with the torso series, Vásquez de la Horra makes anatomical notes through text, denoting in various languages embryo, lumbar, coccyx, umbilical cord, and tubes. In other images, the artist draws attention to an unusual relationship between these fetuses and earlobes through comparative double drawings that reconfigure the notion of pregnancy and reflect not only on human hearing but also on drawing, something so central to the artist’s practice.

How can a growing human body look so much like an earlobe? The title of one work offers a hint: Botánica de la evolución II (Evolutionary Botanics II; cat. 2.16). This experimentation subverts the dichotomy between the animal and plant worlds and demonstrates that drawing is an essential language not only for science and its desire for truth but for the visual arts and their need for fabulation.

“Los pensamientos” (“The thoughts”)

As her career has progressed, Sandra Vásquez de la Horra has included more and more text in her work. In her first decade of work, writing appears only occasionally, even though she was highly interested in poetry. Later, words appear frequently, especially in reference to anatomical studies. By the early 2000s, the presence of text takes on na even greater dimension in her images.

The works produced during the 2010s differ from Vásquez de la Horra’s previous images in the compositional and even semantic nature of her practice. The technique the artist invented during the 1990s—drawing on paper and dipping the finished drawings in beeswax—is perfected and taken to new scales, with paper sizes ranging from as intimate as A5 (5⅞ × 8¼ in.) to as large as A3 (11¾ × 16½ in.). Oddly enough, these larger works are more minimalist; her compositions give more space to the emptiness of the paper, which amplifies the cream tone provided by the beeswax.

In this new work, Vásquez de la Horra began to draw hominid shapes being transformed into objects, plants, or other animals. These beings are flanked by words that arouse curiosity and generate some discomfort in the viewer—what are the denotative relationships between them? What is the dynamic, for example, that unites a human figure, surrounded by flies, who carries an automatic weapon and has the phrase “Billy and the flys” next to him? Who is Billy? Would a gun be needed to exterminate these flies? These drawings walk the tightrope between the absurd and the artistic traditions that have drawn upon it—from the Surrealist avant-garde in the visual arts to Dadaist poetry, passing through the Theatre of the Absurd.

Since this extended series began, Vásquez de la Horra has constantly experimented with ways to present these artworks. She creates compelling clouds of images from different times and in various sizes, which establishes relationships between these figures, just like a family tree. The texts of one image could easily have been given to another piece. Even when dealing with ideas whose utterances are given in languages as disparate as Spanish, English, Italian, and German—a reflection of the places where the artist has lived and her many educational paths—these voluble groups of words indicate that the ways of displaying sets of these images, like an imaginary sticker album, border on the immeasurable.

The relationships between images and words occur at a speed consistent with los pensamientos (the thoughts)—the title of one of the works in this series and of this exhibition section. In this drawing, an angel illuminates two people below him, just as the relationships between image and text provided by the scenes invented by Vásquez de la Horra lead us to different types of illumination, obscurity, estrangement, and associations. This series never allows us to forget: writing is an exercise in drawing, just as drawing is strongly linked to writing.

“Aguas profundas” (“Deep waters”)

Since the early 2010s, Sandra Vásquez de la Horra’s work has expanded in scale and in the use of color. She began to assemble her drawings from four or even six different parts. At the same time, the black and white of graphite on paper in previous works opened space for watercolor and for a way of applying color that, curiously, dialogues with some of her early drawings.

Vásquez de la Horra’s interest in leaving the walls of the gallery and creating pieces that are displayed in the center of the rooms, just like sculptures, also stands out. Using paper not only as a surface but as a founding structure, the artist produced a series of works in the shape of houses and accordions that invite the spectator to view them in the round. The accordion-shaped works reveal their surfaces and narratives to the viewer little by little, just like a book read slowly; once we notice its verse, a range of new narratives opens up. Just like her rare but significant experimentations with video, these objects remind us that capturing all sides of these images at once is impossible.

In addition to these formal elements, something existentially differentiates these recently produced images: the humorous and even somber character of her smaller drawings are out of the picture. In these new images, there is a certain reverence, silence, and interest in both transcendence and reflection around the notion of collectivity that was not evident in her previous work. It is no coincidence that the exhibition proposes a conversation between these works and the artist’s few forays into photography in the early 2000s. In series such as Trance, La venus (Venus), and Changó defiende el Amazona (Changó Defends the Amazon)—the artist suggests a spiritual universe that seems to find an echo only in the larger recent drawings so well installed at the Venice Biennale in 2022.

Saludos a Olorum (Greetings to Olorum), for example, is an iconic work in this new area of Vásquez de la Horra’s practice. It features a reference to and reverence of the orixá (god) Olorum, who created the universe according to different aspects of Yoruba culture and Candomblé, the artist’s own religion. Other works, such as El portador de estrellas (The Star Bearer) and Deidad planetaria (Planetary Deity), incorporate elements of the cosmos, bringing their iconographies closer to, for example, the mysteries embedded in tarot cards.

These works feature the longest sentences ever included by the artist in her pieces. Unlike the fragmentary character of previous text, these sentences suggest action so strongly as to be cinematic; in fact, each composition resembles a still from an animation. The subjects always seem frozen in some action, anticipating or succeeding in a climax that will have to be completed mentally by the spectator. If in El Pueblo unido jamás será vencido (The People United Will Never Be Defeated) we seem to be observing the act of placing a star on some high and visible place, Y este mar quetranquilo nos baña (And This Sea, So Tranquil, That Bathes Us) seems to be the presage of a great dive.[1]

***

This seems to be the invitation made in recent years by Sandra Vásquez de la Horra’s practice: the immersion of our imaginations in her narrative suggestions. In the section “Late un fuego allí dentro,” we deal with the notion of desire through volcanoes, while in “Botanica de la evolución,” the earth is evoked through plant and human anatomy. Finally,if with “Los pensamientos” one perceives the more aerial character of her creations and connections between words, with “Aguas profundas” we are submerged in the mysteries of the universe, in the myths of origin and in the silence of disappearance.

There is an icy cave deep inside, at the bottom of every erupting volcano.

[1] This title refers to the Chilean national anthem, composed in 1819, that includes the line: “y ese mar que tranquilo te baña.”

(texto feito para o catálogo de “The Awake Volcanoes”, de Sandra Vásquez de La Horra, no Denver Art Museum, em 2024)