Sandra Vásquez de la Horra’s cultured and sophisticated art, while thrusting its roots down into South American origins, is nurtured by a rich and varied visual culture as well as an in-depth knowledge of European and South-American literature, philosophy and anthropology. Sandra Vásquez de la Horra always drew. Her radically figurative drawings are never “beautiful” in the classic sense of the term. They have a rough, immediate quality, a sense of urgency to them. They feature many personal elements. Since 1997, the artist finishes her drawings by dipping them in wax. This treatment gives her work a unique materiality and endows the pencil line with ambiguous depth. Her line is fluid, firm and applied in an unbroken movement. The shapes are often filled in, as if “colored in” in graphite, in a wide variety of grease and blacks, and sometimes, though rarely, set off by a touch of yellow, pink or red. Each of her drawings is a work of art in its own right, telling a particular story and revealing a particular soul, but Vásquez de la Horra likes to arrange them into large wall installations comprising up to a hundred pieces at times of a variety of sizes. Typography is widely present in Sandra Vásquez de la Horra’s work. Many of her drawings combine figure and writing, with the latter changing the import of the picture. Sometimes the artist allows the words to take up most of the space, dominating the motif and becoming the real subject of the drawing. In relation to her anthropological studies, myths and popular tales are at the centre of the artist’s concerns and provide her with the subject of many drawings. Religion, social hierarchy, repression, sex, black magic are also major themes in her work. Politics is also an important component in Vásquez de la Horra’s world, although it tends to play a latent role. Vásquez de la Horra also participates in the tradition of a great family of artists, one of whose ancestors are Goya and Redon. Some of her figures, particularly their faces, seem to be a discreet, vibrant tribute to the great “master of blacks”.
