A los animales los mata el sol
Erick Viquez
June 6 — July 8
 
Erick Víquez (Cartago, Costa Rica, 1993) is a painter whose practice draws from landscape,
literature, and art history to explore memory, time, and the gothic dimensions of Latin American culture. Referencing historical and personal archives, popular culture, and literature, his work reflects a deep interest in the colonial and violent narratives embedded within the region’s history. His images of domestic settings and tropical rural environments are haunting and ambiguous spaces where familiarity collapses and the unsettling seeps into the everyday.

Through visual explorations of the jungle, the suffocating heat of the tropics, and social violence past and present, Víquez constructs a distinctly Central American Gothic where tropical exuberance coexists with darkness and repression.
In A Los Animales los Mata el Sol (Animals Die in the Sun), Víquez presents seventeen new oil paintings alongside three new drawings. Inspired in part by El Jaúl by Max Jiménez, the exhibition continues the artist’s exploration of a distinctly Central American Gothic, where the tropics emerge not as idyllic or picturesque, but as spaces charged with heat, repression, beauty, and latent violence.

Víquez’s work aligns with a broader lineage of Latin American artists who have resisted the exoticized expectations historically imposed upon tropical landscapes. Like Armando Morales, José Bedia, and Wifredo Lam before him, he reimagines the landscape as psychologically complex and haunted, where lushness and unease coexist. His paintings challenge the “tropical picturesque,” revealing instead an atmosphere where memory, mythology, and social tension converge.
Víquez is Editorial Director for Libros Humildes and Technical Editor for Flores Artificiales. He
has served as a research assistant for the Central American Print Collection at the University
of Costa Rica and as a guest lecturer at the School of Architecture (UCR). His work has been
exhibited in Costa Rica, Chile, London, Los Angeles, and Miami, including at Galería deCERCA, Salita Temporal, and Hannah Sloan Gallery in Los Angeles. His work is held in private collections across Bogotá, Panama City, Mexico City, Los Angeles, and London.
​