critics

JAVIER PONCE CEVALLOS
Diario HOY Quito-Ecuador
25/10/92

The last party

I cannot forget the bugs that drew one day Alicia Viteri. Long time has passed, but these new exhibition of her work, hanging these days at La Galeria, has driven me to this way of maximizing the metaphor, to pursue her obsessions to give the grotesque/symbol of each species or terrors.

In the case of spiders was enough to be true to their proportions. The body of the animal was enough.
In the case of male power, it has been necessary to look at the bottom of the same images, the features of the grotesque. What could better express the power- seems to ask Alicia Viteri in her art today-than the daily life of the powerful?

A power in ruins, however, drawn from their own rubble his breath, crowbar, his secret game, the gift of survival. Alicia Viteri has found that behind these routines, deadly sins occurred: Sloth, lust, greed. Combining a few substantial symbols in her paintings, to make them one of the starkest interpretations I know of power.

This time incorporates elements/symbols of powers: The golden crowns, diamond jewelry, the texture of the decorations, the ambiguity and lies of the gauze and veils. With those gold’s, grays, blacks, browns in their pure states colors of a coven.

An amazing synthesis of our republican lives which is presented to us by Alicia Viteri. A portrait of a wrong learned lordship, a lordship of gammolianism and coup. Where republican omnipotence appears only as a parody of colonial omnipotence.

,

NICANOR OCTAVIO REYES
La Estrella de Panamá
September 1991

Not all that glitters is gold

Like one of those old court painters, Alicia Viteri becomes a chronicler of the life and miracles of the Prosperous Prince.

In the drawings that make up this exhibition, Alicia starts revealing us with deep artistic sensibility , absolute mastery of his craft and relentless fidelity the endless faces of human condition.
Between glitter and tinsel, in lace and brocade, with pearls and diamonds that fill the stage of the life of the prince, there is a glimpsed of the poverty and misery of the souls of those who seemingly have everything and anything they can.

The black and White of the images looks like a radiography of the human spirit that wants to hide and hide behind the dazzling gold and silver. Grimaces that want to be smiles. The grotesque wants to be dressed with silk. And in that deceit that often turns life. The artist becomes a complicit of his characters. She puts make up on them,  perfumes them with flowers, are enriched with necklaces and rings, wraps them up in satins and crepes, dressed them with reality. Making them believe that they are real, they can almost get out of the picture. But at that a last moment a strong line, a forceful brushstroke, defines them and condemns them to his eternal role a metaphor, their perennial role as a mirror of ourselves.

These stories are drawn from the prince and are not made to go to sleep quietly. Alicia tells us this stories with the opposite intention: to open our eyes to life, to let us look at ourselves. To remind us again that not everything that glitters is gold.

I can not forget the bugs that drew one day Alicia Viteri. Long time has passed, but these new exhibition of her work, hanging these days at La Galeria, has driven me to this way of maximizing the metaphor, to pursue her obsessions to give the grotesque/symbol of each species or terrors.

In the case of spiders was enough to be true to their proportions. The body of the animal was enough.
In the case of male power, it has been necessary to look at the bottom of the same images, the features of the grotesque. What could better express the power- seems to ask Alicia Viteri in her art today-than the daily life of the powerful?

A power in ruins, however,drawn from their own rubble his breath, crowbar, his secret game, the gift of survival. Alicia Viteri has found that behind these routines, deadly sins occurred: Sloth, lust, greed. Combining a few substantial symbols in her paintings, to make them one of the starkest interpretations I know of power.