“Hambre para mañana” (Hunger for tomorrow) by Gómezdelacuesta
 
Fifteen months later we return to the task, 450 days with all its hours, minutes and seconds, and we are back, having taken what were completely unnecessary risks, risks that were no use at all, because everything just carries on exactly the same, in fact worse, as now we are even more screwed, when you spend so much time being hit, each blow on an unhealed wound, that just won’t close, it hurts even more, it screws you, double screws you, triple screws you.
Unnecessary risk part two and those of us that are left, if they do not kill us first. Second parts never were very good, neither third, nor fourth… Already there isn’t enough bread for today and hunger won’t wait for tomorrow. If it goes on like this we’ll retire in the middle of all this crap. But how the hell can we retire when there is no work, no pensions, nothing? We’ll retire from life, and that will be when the swines legalize euthanasia, active and passive, and selective castrations, genital amputation, carried out by those directed to cut the balls off everyone else, justified mutilations for the common good, for the good of those in charge. A matter of balls, of cojones, of testicles, of dosh and of how it’s distributed, and if that doesn’t suffice they will start on the death penalty, and put us fools in extermination camps.
 
Marcelo Viquez again throws his bad temper in our face, a bilious, acidic and sibylline spunk, acerbic by its stealth, without evidence or stridency. Viquez speaks again about earning a crust, with blood on his forehead and that, combined with the sweat no longer suffices - and this time he speaks to us about art, speaks to us of his own work, with which although he is earning a living, he is losing himself. He shits on art that speaks of art, on everything that surrounds it, even real art itself and its artists, its critics and on its organizers and on its institutions and galleries. In favour of art or against it? Art-attitude or art-discipline? Crap art for the remainder of our youth and installations made with trash for all our life. Political art is a dirty trick, good art has to be terrorist and anarchist: a lit candle over a petrol can, there is no more wax than that of which is burning and, then when it burns, blows everything up, a risk as unnecessary as that of holding an exhibition, such as the placing of a Uruguayan taxi sawn in two, in the Kewenig Palma Gallery’s chapel.
 
Viquez knows what a comb is worth and he also knows that gold has a safe value in this world of lies, therefore he has made some of his pieces in gold, a gigantic seed and just to the side, the shattered illusion that produced it all, specular visions, and gold, real gold, gold that is sold at the price of gold, gold never fails and Viquez seldom fails.
 
A pedestal elevates an object to the category of art and Viquez elevates the pedestals to artistic objects, going from the piece, to concentrate on its base. In these hurried times, we don’t need to do anymore, it’s enough, in this game of life where everything has worth because some said that it had. His podiums are the best, the top dogs and if you put them all together, furthermore with the people, like us, who are also the base, then we too are the best. And if we unite we seem more, we shout louder, but they do not make us more fearful. To stamp your feet is like masturbating, it only calms for a wee while, hence they let us masturbate when we want, thus have us controlled, scalded, deprived.
 
Viquez also masturbates but it is to show up the hollowness of contemporary art, Viquez reproduces his own art up to confusion, to nausea, to satiation, does and undoes, copies, copies himself, includes his work inside his own work and multiplies it to the infinite, towards the unfathomable, towards what the modern call to be reinvented, to re-think the forms, extras of those. He shows up the elitist loafer and tries to turn our head, to make us look outside, because everything that matters happens in the street, in real life, where people like us, play with the crust and the crust of their children: hunger for today, tomorrow we’ll see…….
 
Marcelo Viquez (Montevideo, 1971) lives and works in Palma de Mallorca, where he moved after his studies of Artes Plásticas y Diseño Gráfico. Since 2002 the artista has participated in several solo exhibitions in institutions as CCA- Centro Cultural Andratx, Mallorca; and group exhibitions Deichtorhallen, Hamburgo; in Museo Nacional de Artes Visuales Fotografía Digital, Montevideo, Uruguay; and in the Biennal „Socle du Monde - Between Cultures“ in HEART Herning Museum of Contemporary Art, Dinamarca, and recently as finalist in Premi Ciutat de Palma “Antoni Gelabert” de Artes Visuales in Casal Solleric, among others.
 
His works are represented in European private collections and in public Spanish collections as Es Baluard - Museo de Arte Moderno y Contemporáneo de Palma de Mallorca, Consell de Mallorca, in the Ayuntamiento de Palma de Mallorca, the Fundación Barceló, in the Colección Sanahuja and in the Montana Mobler collection in Denmark.