An Interview with Manuel Velazquez

This interview was conducted on December 26, 2002, at the home of Manuel Velázquez in Xalapa, Mexico.

ROWELL: How do you describe your work at this point in your career as an artist?

VELÁZQUEZ: I began my art—what would become my art as a professional—by working on the relationship between the profane and the sacred by using what are in reality the popular cultures in Mexico and popular cultures of the whole world. I also worked for a long time with opposites, as in the relationship between the ancient and the modern. I have already said the sacred and the profane, the religious and the sexual. And currently my work has been varying a bit. But I keep working on the relation of opposites. I am interested in the relationship that is produced in the world in a more or less chaotic manner—that is, the chaos that is produced in the world. The formats have also varied; I have worked a lot with paint on wood and now I'm working on paper. Yes, paint on wood but in a manner more to my liking, a little more, in academic quotes, "formal." I have also done wood sculpture. It's been a process of looking toward the past, of looking toward my origins and of some looking at the present, toward more contemporary issues.

ROWELL: Apparently, over the years, your work has emphasized human figuration. But in your use of human figuration there's a certain kind of abstractness. It seems now that you have moved in an interior way with the human form and yet you still use the exterior of the human anatomy.

VELÁZQUEZ: I find it a bit difficult to think about the future. My work is moving in various directions. On one hand, it touches on a very personal side; in some things it could be thought of as autobiographical. On the other hand, I want that same work to speak in different directions. In addition to the personal side, I put other ideas that are not those I feel are happening to me but rather they are issues that I am seeing in society or that I'm reading about. So that creates, let's say, the chaos, or the contradiction, or the opposites that I'm talking about. My work has an open language that moves in many directions. The human figure in my work conserves traditional traces but also allows the viewer to move away from them. My work contains autobiographical elements as well as elements not related to me as an individual.

ROWELL: I'm not only talking about the anatomy as a complete or realistic form. You've taken parts of the human body and dislocated them. Oftentimes you focus on the head and the eyes or the heart and other organs of the body. You place them in unexpected locations in your painting. What do you want to achieve with this isolated focus and dislocation?

VELÁZQUEZ: I have completed a new portrait. The initial theme of that piece was John the Baptist's head, which, as you remember from the Bible, was cut off and given to Pontius Pilate, who gave it to his wife. It was kind of a gift, and symbolically it was a castration of man. The piece likewise speaks in two directions, and it contains a chalk outline like that the police make at a crime scene. They draw the outline on the ground where the body is found. So in my painting the outline can be equally directed to a crime or to the Biblical theme of John the Baptist's head—to a feeling of impotence or frustration. My work always speaks in various directions. Above all, I also use sexual organs, feminine as well as masculine. Today the masculine organ is a very strong symbol. And I am interested in questioning the spectator. I...