The viceroys of Peru, rulers from 1543 to 1821, were depicted in official portraits following very rigid models to highlight political power and emphasize theatricality. Unlike many other cultural artifacts of the colonial era that were destroyed during the independence movements of the nineteenth century—including the portraits of the viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata—these paintings were preserved in what is now the National Museum of Archaeology, Anthropology and History in Lima to affirm a continuity between viceregal institutionality and the new republican structure. The images have become part of the Peruvian historical imagination. In the large-format paintings in his exhibition “Virrey not to be Rey” (“Viceroy Not to Be King”), Peruvian artist Andrés Argüelles Vigo has erased, blurred, and exchanged elements of and added new components to the original viceregal portraits, using layers of fiction and parody to reflect on shared historical discourses and on the situation we Peruvians face in the midst of present national and global crises.
Argüelles Vigo’s recent works have focused on analyzing how art-historical narratives are constituted and how audiences establish relationships with cultural objects. Often, he has sought out subjects that finish in “second place”—ones who are not thought of as winners and whose value may be unacknowledged but who might continue to aspire to more prominent historical significance. In this way, he has explored icons and characters suspended in the potentiality of what can be achieved after defeat. In this new work focusing on Peru’s viceroys—men who were the distant king’s representatives—he has put the spotlight on characters who, for all their power, took second place to the monarch. Argüelles Vigo has always conducted these historical studies by way of an exploration of pictorial language and its formats. In “Virrey not to be Rey,” his experimentation with the painted surface, built up through layers of glaze, coexisted with the deployment of painting as installation. The fluidity of the paint gives vitality to compositions in which silence and absence come to the fore.
The original viceroy portraits included background draperies, heraldic shields, workspaces or tables, and command batons. Argüelles Vigo brings these background elements to the fore. Some of the rulers seem to be in the process of disappearing, leaving only the symbols of their political power to represent their existence. In other compositions, the central place of the viceroy is occupied by a green Power Ranger who, as the plot of the TV series had it, was forced to submit to the dominion of the show’s protagonist: the red Power Ranger. The canvases also portray a large-scale Pepsi can and a pair of gazelles, respectively the second-place cola brand in the consumer market and one of the runners-up for the title of fastest animal on earth. For Argüelles Vigo, the competitive imperatives of contemporary life are part of new modes of coloniality that affect everyone. From a country whose power relations have always rendered it second-place, he invites the viewer to resist today’s dog-eat-dog world and recognize, from our humble position as runners-up, that in the midst of a global crisis it is necessary to imagine new, less hierarchical outlooks.
Translated from Spanish by Michele Faguet.
