The roots of the plastic activity of the artist came from his childhood, from the school where he had the support from his unique art teacher, the painter Carlos Vicente Andrade. He was never attended an academy, he is an autodidactic. He shared the workshop of other youth people and from there he developed his first weapons. The company of “The Three Musketeers” well known of our painting – Jacome, Roman, Iza and Unda, four to do not contradict Dumas – took him toward the New-Figuration, the most exciting experience, inherited from the 70’s in Ecuador. He arrived to a happy hour. The era demanded renovated air, and that course pulled them to the approbation of critics and gradually to the public approbation. By then the times of the native social injustice accusations were passed. The antiwar and the Pre-Columbus movements of the VAN Group were left on the immediate past. With the impetus of the youth that burned inside for changing the damaged world to which they were arriving, they attacked not just against the established government system, but also against their peers – Because by then they did not considered to their teacher, their teachers – with a parricide attitude. In Viver’s words, they stigmatized them as “the painters that have turn their creative genius to please the bourgeois. They have converted themselves into painters of a classroom” The fire of the revolution ran into the veins of the new intellectuals and artists. The era of the justice and the freedom was closed, one needed to offer not just ones life, but also ones art. The generous purpose, it does not matter if it was premature or utopia, made the painter said “The art needs to be an instrument of liberation. This needs to be a challenge that helps the transformation of the societies. This is the reason for which the art needs to impact, not to please”. And he added “It is import to incorporate the art as an element of transformation to the social reality”. It is clear; the art needs to compromise itself to support the change of the old structures and to open the spiritual grooves to the new life.

The Amusement of the Uglysm

Viver had left behind the first drawing tries that into the abstraction, showed on his Second Solo Exposition. He tried then the search of composed situations with a clear exaltation of the line, high load of the casual and with a doubtless expressionist flavor. Once he was aboard of the right ship, the Neo- Figurativism, with a lot of similar things with the Expressionism, he navigated with freedom, by using the more acute tool of the era: The Uglysm. Then he lined up toward the critic, the irony and the ridicule. His bizarre characters, with incomplete drawings and acid colors, fought the love battles at the series: “Homage to Pasolini”. They also floated inside cubicles that were transformed into shop windows which were used to hold any hopeful rooster- fighting players. In the Quasimodo-Marieta painting, he wounded by an arrow, supplicated to the evaded Esmeralda. This was one of the first signs that gave vision recognition to the new theory of the signs. In the sarcastic painting “The Court Painter”, in some way a homage to the painter and his model subject, the model was riding a sawdust horse, while the painter was hiding behind the canvas. In other painting, he showed how the backstitches which Giorgio de Chirico basted his manikins. In this one he put more attention to the background than to the figures. Tauromaquias (Bull fighting), comics of the absurdity in excellent drawings, showed some absurd characters that practiced assaults and deathblows, some times in a comic atmosphere, and tremendous in some others. The language was similar to the one of his generation peers, but the metamorphosis that suffered later, separated them. The continuous activity and the attitude of the artist, situated then as one of the best drawers of the country, and as a strong representative of the Neo- Figurativism, found echo and recognition on several contests. In 1973, he got the gold medal Diogenes Paredes on the drawing field. Two years later, he got one of the acquisition painting awards from the Culture House Showroom. In 1979, he got the Paris Award from the French Alliance. The following year, he got the highest Award from the Mariano Aguilera Showroom.

Journey

The figurative forms of his paintings gradually changed to abstract, agglomerated, solid and amorphous signs. They were less real than the hermetic Chirico, who he evoked in some way. They were also closed to Bacon’s on his monumental gelatinous effigies, but he also forgot the concrete characters, which were reduced to unformed masses laid on the bed. By 1981 the painter said “At this moment the Neo- Figurativism is becoming obsolete”, and four years later he said “I am transitioning from the Neo- Figurativism to the Abstract”. The travelling that he made to Europe in 1979 opened him new perspectives. His 6 month stay, thanks to the Paris Award, gave him time and opportunity to begin with the carving and to observe the aesthetic and artistic tendencies of the old world. This experience gave him new energy to clean of the dust of his wardrobe and to use it again. In 1984, he presented an exposition in Bonn, Germany at the IFA Gallery, together with the painter from Guayaquil Jose Carreno. More important that the promotion made by the German Media, including the well known magazine “Humboldt” which is edited in Spanish, was the encouragement that the far distance from his country offered him to developed the series about “Joanna, the crazy”, defined by him, not just as a character, but as “an idea that lives from the humour and the tragedy”. This was in some way the re-encounter with the national masters, to whom he was separated before, in a special way with Tabara, which paintings he admires, and from whom he recognized his influence during this period. His painting is a pictorial writing that uses other elements, even this obeys to the same resource of the compositional dispersion with a superficial chromatism.

Another impact that he received was the one from the Spanish Informalism and the one from the International Gesturism. He returned with a great enrichment and disposed to continue the fight for the proper language. Then he turned to the Material Abstraction. In great overlapped planes, he resolved textures and invented codes, not esoteric, but demanded but the same painting structure. He worked with bundles and sackcloth suitcases with moorings and attachments that were set to produce repulsive and reflexive effects. For some time he worked also with the maze of the Conceptualism, and he produced a beautiful and humble box of chicken eggs.

Chronos, Eros, the Critic and the Absurd.

This painter of illusions has among his virtues, the one of capture with lucidity his own trajectory. Since his beginnings, he recapitulated and summarized his activity in “social critic, eroticism and the tendency to observe the absurd”. The series of carvings “Erotomanias”, presented on 1981 at the Sosa-Larrea Gallery, set him in a thematic that flourished with great force on the Exposition at the Green Apple in December of 1989. To the fineness of the impressions of that exposition, continued in the last one, the demystification of the country virgins full with folkloric, patriotic, and ecologic attributes. Also, some other women were drown with color, similar to the Kokoshka’s ones, who threaded the chromatic lines until the bodies were established with the insinuation of frivolous pleasures.

Chronos bet to Eros, who crowned his victory with excellent paintings. This was the Viver’s personal apotheosis, worthy of the burgess tradition since five centuries ago.

Lenin Oña. X Anniversary of the Diners Magazine. March 1990.

Interesting Artistic Mural

… Carlos Viver, who started in painting on 1970, is a very well known name among the Plastic Movement of our country, not just by his splendid paintings, but also by his concerned for the tendency of the cinematography and alternative videos. He has some works, and also he participated as a technical staff for the movie “La Tigra” (The Tigress).

Mario Monteforte says in his book “The man signs”, “Carlos Viver’s color evolves from the delicate tonalities and the economic palette, to the lived gamma of his last stages. About the form and the theme, Viver goes from cerebral compositions to the Neo-objectivism. He translates his intense social worries with mordacity and displeasure to the contemporary world, in which he lives. In his most recent paintings, the theme disappears and the forms become free, baroque, and sensual and interlaced in a passage suggestion.

Viver came to Cuenca to facilitate a seminar. His preoccupation was to wake up and to develop the creative possibilities of his students, and the search of the no traditional resources to create art, two things that he obtained in an evident way. The mural that decorates the wall of the Architecture School is an evidence of it. It was produced with wood panels, nails and paint, and it demonstrated the great aesthetic possibilities that are enclosed on the most unusual materials when one uses ones creativity and art, and over all when one sees the life with new eyes.

Mercury Newspaper. Cuenca, May 1990.

The New Figuration of Carlos Viver

Since the beginning as a painter, Carlos Viver went into the wide and new field of the “New Figuration”. The bizarre, the incisive and the compromised situations of human beings, always tempered Viver with composed balance of form and color.

He has kept a constant search and a personality that is purer everyday. The Social Politic message from his first period, has gradually changed to a more elaborated and academic painting, which also shows a better technique. His drawing and chromatic accentuates the irony that characterized his characters, that in this case are women. Women from different social classes and ages, dressed up with baroque dresses and opulent decorations, in a monopoly of color and form, and with secret and ambiguous eccentricities …

Unsacred Altars

On his weird and unsacred altars, Viver shows “Bad habits virgins”. They are passionate mistresses, sketched in monochromatic fabrics, which spies and reveals in textured zones mystified in old walls and rough spaces, that throw the structure and color, acquire emblematic values.

Viver goes in the search of new perspectives and possibilities, in order to make his current “virgins” more acceptable and less compromised with his passed women paintings. He pursues the specialty and transforms it in a temporal dynamic. From a sign cultivator, he goes to the materiality, which is cleverly modulated until he succeeds by getting a color matter and a filling lucidly worked. He searches until he gets the sublimation of the graphic- pictorial characteristics, tied to a foreseen composite principal that constitutes true “codes” to reduce the sign to a kind of writing similar to the “graffiti”.

Abstract Reality

When he tries to represent the external reality – abstract and signified -, he looks to solve the verisimilitude and perspective problems, in order to value the painting and to avoid that this be just a simple decorated surface. These are the causes for which his women, treated with an expressive drawing, rise from the slowly worked surfaces that avoid that he turns to an abstract-constructive structuring, pursuing an “artistic space” without reference to any extrinsic or intrinsic reality of the painter.

Carlos Villacis Endera. The Hour Newspaper. June 1991.

Females

Painting women and only women, why not? It is not that women be an “object” as feminist says. This is because women are like the other side of the medal, or the moon face or the clouded world of the charm and the magic, the night and its mystery.

One never ends to understand woman, and when one wants to trap her, she escapes. Carlos Viver tries to trap women on his creole madonnas or on his women captured by color smears or by the arabesque multicolor of his pictorial calligraphy.

Carlos Viver in his exposition at the Green Apple presents a clear trajectory. In first place are his virgins, females or simple matrons with dresses in which Viver places signs, landscapes and varied elements with a doubtless surrealistic tonic. In those dresses the artist incorporates a whole magic universe, where one can distinguish all those symbols that surround him in his creative process, specially the birds and the fish. Because earth always has been a feminine, enriched and fecund element, Viver’s madonnas are the mother nature and the true landscapes. In the same way, his madonnas’ coifs or headdresses are converted on vegetables and trees integrated to the magic of a world that is pure nature.

 After this series of loafer ladies, Viver felt the necessity of “relaxing” as he mentions. This relaxing brought a new series of no solid and no matron women. The new ones were “feminine women” as somebody mentioned. They were women with theater characteristics, the woman-character to whom Viver does not treat with the detail of his madonnas, but with the great formal relax of the color and the drawing. Viver dresses these women with daring color smears. They are seated alone or on pair showing that “eternal feminine” that the artist has captured with those smears and with those relaxed paintbrush touches to make women emerge from those rich gauzes and ethereal fabrics.

The third and last women instance of Viver shows a series of women showing part of their fascinations. The artist says that in this series, the erotic is a creative element. The formal treatment is in this case, more liberated from the visual image, and in some paintings, the artist is stepping on not figurative ground. The constant is the woman which is discovered even farther than the nervous and arabesque graphics which start to play their own symphony.

These three Carlos Viver’s stages show clearly that his creative process is in ebullition, which is important because from this moment he can create his best paintings. But at this point, Viver affronts a crossroad toward the future, where he will need to do a small balance to canalize his creative force where his own intuition will lead him, as it blissfully has been until now.

Claudio Mena Villamar. Today Newspaper. November 1989.

Sensations in front of Carlos Viver’s virgins

She is motionless, she incorporates; she is dressed, she is nude; she feels, beautiful careless, the red fish that chill her thighs, the purple birds which peck her erected breasts; she flies, she preys, she is alive.

She loves the purple of the last penumbras and the opened bedrooms to all the voracious red beaks, the inflamed yellow eyes, the blue scales hidden among the carnivorous tongues of flying wings which go in or out from the violent stroke from the womb which is thirsty of all the serene dressed virgin plumage, beaks, scales, eyes and foliage which with the only expression of her generous mouth and her exited eyes calls us to the most high intimate ceremony of the bodies, the beautiful party of nudity when it comes from inside and when it calls us from each pore and when it pants from each blood drop and when it sighs from each hour of life.

She, as vigorous and quiet, as absent and distant, wants to launch herself, ripped and malicious, into the impassive arms of the loved desire. She wants to dance, in an immodest way, in the infinite bodies of all the violent blue and yellow passions. She wants to be silk, attacked by all swans. She wants to be a wide burning lip, ignited flame, salivated foot, licked breast, electric waist, convincing kiss, voracious access, and once she has been uncovered, she blushes and gets livid. She is only flapping wings, pure profile, intimate suffocation, blooming sunflower, wild cry, blind shine and weak swoon.

She gilds of green over the liquid ocher ground. She gilds of celestial when the rain falls over her and of solid outline when she stays alone and without any protection – through inside – in her own silence.

All she vibrates and evokes sensible singing bells at dawn time, and portrays the loosed hair sweaty nocturnal lover.

Patricio Romero y Cordero.

“… The second woman, in pair and whose Viver searches in several paintings, belongs to the Safo’s family. Only two dark and strange smears are necessary (between purple and eros), one for the hair and the other for her clothes, to understand and to feel that Viver, when he dresses women with hair and clothes, what he does, is to strip them, to give them a strange perennial, the beauty almost sad (or ancient) of sin. Two women, very close one to the other, pose not for a picture, but for a past. In this series, Viver, succeed in painting what it is not painted. Karlito’s white tobacco, thank you …”

Hulio Ruales

 “… The drawings of feminine faces, produced with paintbrush, leave evidence of the lineal, spontaneous and loose origin of the most awarded and intentional paintings. The figures of virtue – very compound, painted and finished – have in common (every one in a different way) with the other sinful and expressionist ones, the imposition of the attitudes. In the chastity series, a light critical and ironic intension is intuited. In the erotic series, it is clear that the zeal for releasing pictorial and sketched energies is of less conceptual responsibility and disturbing plastic freedom.”

Lenin Oña

“…They are without doubt, the best, and they insinuate forwarded steps through the contemporary, by a neo-figurative line that can reach high territories if this loads with concept from inside and with contemporary acute expression from outside, without forgetting to warn that the inside and the outside of the paintings transposes one to the other, every time… and there is ostentation and game on the line, on the mark, on the matter, and on the color that remember other interesting moment of the restless artist.

If all this is assumed with coherent continuity, we need to discount the lucidity of Viver. We can promise a great stage, starting with these primary pieces that paint the world”.

Hernan Rodriguez Castelo

The paintings of Carlos Viver are presented as a structure which can be permeated by the emotion. A set of forms worked with occupation virtuosity and with a truthful presence, justified by the sensibility and endowed with a greater load than the one from a trivial vision.

As a special form of language, he denounced the complicity between man and man’s dreams. He obligates the spectator to see farter than just the simple recognition of the figure to consult the palpable stroke of the omnipresent.

The figure is the main theme of his painting; his favourite models: Manuelas, Meninas, and Queens, with the recompilation of his visual memory, painted with ample contemporary freedom. These beings elapsed and are perceived as a lyric incitation, or they are accommodated into audacious aesthetic resolutions. Any way, these beings  incite Viver to explore his own reactions, to follow his imperative eye, to recompose and to re-invent the world according to his own attitude and to his personal creative evidence which is constituted on a good proof of his talent.

Besides, when these series appeared, Viver dominated the knowledge of painting. In his transit through art and in his personal devotions, he succeeded on the combination of sensuality-spiritual, concrete sense and elevated aesthetic sense.

With great desire to reach the value of the content, the artist ended on a humanistic painting to exalt the human figure.

These imagines are rich and flexible enough to go into the formal and the suggestive ground, establishing in this way an inherent magic to the same reality that inspire them.

Dr. Ines M. Flores. June 14, 1991.

The world of the visual

“I feel and I know that I am a painter, but this does not mean that I am not interested in every thing else that is around me. I like to do thing for a while, but latter on, I like to dedicate myself to investigate. I believe that one must not remain tied to an expression way and that it is important that those desires of renovating oneself, abidingly subsist”, Carlos Viver says in order to explain his intentions of dedicating deeper to one of his obsessions: Cinematography. I outlined the scenography for “La Tigra” (The tigress). I have produced several audiovisuals and I will participate in a sketch contest. This self-educated painter, is and artist that needs to abandon what he is doing and to change to a different activity. Since his youth, he felt capable of doing a lot of activities. He worked at a sawmill. He dedicated to advertising, to typography and “overall to loiter a lot”.

Goodbye to the Neo-Figurative

The reiterated utilization of the images and the forms lose the faculty of communicate. In the Neo- Figurativism – in which several painters, including myself, penetrated – the idea was the most important. I drew figures and I tried to extract from them, new possibilities. The ugly and the caricatured were exalted. Besides that, it coincided perfectly with a historic moment, and when one is young, it is natural to search for answers, and one always has energy, Viver indicates, when he refers to what he and several young artists did one decade ago. “At the end of the century, Painting is recycling almost all the innovative movements. There is nothing new under the sun, but this century was very prolific for the transportation of the life forms and thinking”, Viver says. For him, right now there is not a dominant tendency. One can find the most diverse tendencies, but what one can see the most, is that the pictorial manifestation turns more to individualizing than to adhere to any school.

 “Now – Viver appoints – definitely the Monsterism bores me. After six years of silence, this is a kind of re-entry and I do not know where I will end. I love the abstraction and going from one place to another. But you can be sure that I will not spend my rest of my life painting women”.

Marco Arauz. Diario Hoy. May 1993.

Carlos Viver’s women:

The women once again emerge from the painting of Carlos Viver. They are faces with enigmatic glances that banish in the middle of smears, which are inserted in textures like those walls limy or yellow, fragile, intervened in most cases with graffiti.

Viver tells that those women have been rising almost spontaneously in a gestured manner. In many paintings the lines have been traced with the paintings directly coming from the tube, and sometimes the tube itself has served to do the drawing.

“Some years ago I started making characters at virgin manner. The feminine characters have always patrolled in my work; now they are individualized. It is a theme that I like and that is why I have persisted”, said the painter.

He has been asked if his recent work can be classified as a series, for being monothematic, and he responded that it was not, “because each painting is a world apart that resolves in its own context, it has its own solution.” Remember that there are painters that have been dedicated to do eyes only. The challenge -he said- is to insist in an idea and the idea has multiple paths.

The erotic in Viver is the continuity and rupture, incessant search of a feminine beautiful but also the will to take the absurd world to its extremity, Goya’s world with shades of Toulose-Lautrec and of fright.

What also makes an impression in the most recent stage of Viver is the synthetic strength depurated from his paintings. Viver surely paints starting from impetus impulses, from furious and passionate attacks, from stylistic raptures that remind people in part of the baroques in the contradictory lines, of the elimination of the physical traits to realize the violent and tortured rhythm, to Ingres for the pureness of the lines, and finally to Renoir for the passion of the women that he releases in his paintings.

In the erotic work of Viver, there is a species of voluptuousness of the nostalgia, of the nudeness, of the ingenious, or to express better, of the purifier.

  The figure is the central motive of his paintings: his favorite models, Manuelas, Meninas, Reinas (Qweens), with the abridgment of his visual memory, painted with natural contemporary freedom. These beings elapse and are perceived as a lyric incitation, or they arrange themselves to audacious aesthetic resolutions. At any rate, he is incited to explore his own reactions, to follow the imperatives of her eye, to mend and reinvent the world according to the creative personal indications, which are constituent in good trials of his talent.

Furthermore, when these series appear, Viver dominates the knowledge of painting. In his pace for the art and in his personal devotions, he has accomplished the combination of sensualism, spiritualization, sense of the concrete and elevated aesthetic sense.

Diario Universo. Universe Newspaper. November of 1991.

The core of his world is the human figure, in special way the feminine one: naked or dressed, virgin or pervert, popular heroin or untiring tramp, always the woman, in her different modes, as a constant in all Viver’s painting. And all of them painted with calmed down pulse and ludicrous execution, as if it was true, before the painting were an entrust act, direct love entrust.

His paintings keep a rare hermetism. As if something were palpitating, not in the figure, but behind or around it, as an ironic or challenging gesture to sketch the mask, to destroy the idols and to appoint the sophisticated social games. The erotic in Viver is only a sample book of the weak pain or the slight nostalgia of the loss, it be love, youth, or innocence. Maybe this could be the reason for his frenetic waste of colors and the violent music internal forms.

Viver possesses a very particular and proper stroke, in the middle of an intense and rich coloring. His compositions are cerebral, the execution is ludicrous and the results are palpitating and pure emotion. This work is only possible with the domain of the occupation, the accurate knowledge of the forms, and with a deep sensibility to trap what shines and lives around. He knows painting, and truly, makes it sensual, suggestive, shaking and fugacious as a woman that always will be mine, even if I do not see her never again.

The forms of his women, breakers of myths, when they are covered, they wear two or one hundred flower petal dresses, red birds with fish eyes, blue fish covered with loosed petals and fresh leaves, and reptiles with wings that do not open, strange specimens domesticated by blind wise persons and blind magicians.

Where there is fresh execution and theme sincerity, there is poetry, and in this work it exists in abundance.

Bernarda Perez. Catalogue, Form and Color from Ecuador. MVSWM Art Gallery. Panama 1993.

Painting as a Spiritual Exploration.

Jorge Davila Vasquez

When Viver was 15 years old, he was plenty filled with restlessness that fills the heart of sensible men at this age. In the core, he intuited God, but he was also owner of a lot of other world perceptions, among them were the death, the supernatural, the ones that isolated the spectrum fog, the ones that did reference to the fears and hopes, that materialized throw the human heart in the promotion untied by objects, numbers, dreams, general emotions, playing cards, amulets, and a lot of other fear and hope anchors.

Something as a cold wind came to shake with excessive rationality that tree of imagination, and Carlos became orphan of all fantasy. His vacillated steps turned then little by little to art.

First to Literature, and then to Painting, his more intimated and definitive affections, entrusted him since that epoch, his doubts, emptiness and vacillations, and filled them with that continuous confession that is the artistic youth work, and in them he was finding the path and why not say it, the salvation.

The letters were left in a kind of Platonism never accomplished and most of it, unpublished, in television sketches, tales, and poems, knew by few and protected with zeal, in that waiting that is like the one of the ones that are in love and become old and never finish to unite.

This was because the passion for the plastic, manifested in Viver’s strong inclination for all what was related with image, was filling his existence in an absorbent and total way. This was transformed in a short period of time, in the definitive and plenty consumed love in the life of our artist.

His dedication to carving made of him in few years an important figure of this difficult and exigent in extreme art, a master, that loved to share his knowledge specially with the young people, into the magic universe of acids, plates, chisels, inks and printings that conformed the environment of that discipline.

And in a short period of time, Carlos transform in a one of the most interesting and vigorous painters of his generation.

Immediately the critic classified him into the Neo- Figurativism, especially for those unforgotten and sensual women which were involved in a multicolored dress which in their variegation do not left anything outside, not even the national flag. What beautiful were his belles! It seemed that when they were going out from those erotic old postcards, when they did not decided to show themselves as naked as those apples that open their bodice in poems, took to adorn themselves the whole wardrobe of the grand mothers, everything that was prey of the moth at the attic.

But his fascination for those carnal feminies could not last for a long time. Carlos is in art as he is in life a total rebellious. But one must not mistake when one judges him. He is interested on the change which has its base in the deepest of his being, never on the easy snobbish exchange of fashion, the transformation which finds roots on his restless and healthy versatile heart, and not the mechanic mutation without deep supports, follower of fashion and which weak philosophy – if it has any – is the imitation, and as a man of his epoch, and characteristic fruit of a modern mentality, the novelty attracts him, who can rise, and he rises, from the revelation of the world caducity, but he does not allow to be seduced by the tawdry of novelty with its flashy noise.

This work is a step ahead in his path of the sensible plastic, but deeply engaged with his creative work. This is an important stage in his plastic history which one does not know until when this will last, but which appears with an unquestionable force and sense.

I think that a lot of paintings would contain a transformation code of Viver’s expressive modes, of his new option, but for me, the one which contains them is the Wounded Feminie. In this large clear surface over a dark background, it seems to me that the principle declaration of this production set is contained. It seems as if Viver had killed the carnal seducers of other epoch and that he had decided to penetrate to the mysterious world of the conscientious and aggressive destruction of the figure. Something remains in this composition and in others from those forms that caused that he was classified among the neo-figurative painters, but this happens less every time.

Vague silhouettes travel through an abstract universe, of dark tones, involved in the mystery fog of his artistic work. Beings and objects have, over all, a plastic element function of themes on which the composed virtuality and the painter austere palette are exercised, at this time of his plastic and spiritual exploration, before building evocative elements of any known reality.

The work of Viver at this moment is young, due to the vital breath which is separated from the whole, new, not just in the context of his production, but also in the one from the plastic of the country, printed for now, in one of the multiple slopes of modernity, that one that oscillates between the symbolic and the abstraction, and rich for the generous modelling of the volumes that populate his paintings, by the palpitating emphasis, but not rhetorical that has known to print to his compositions. Besides, he maintains certain sensuality in the corporal construction of those shadows which travel throw a country of darkness, and deploy with strength all what has made of him, since the beginning, a painter with exceptional qualities, generous pasted works that incites when touched, absolute domain of the technic and its chromatic and combination possibilities, audacious composed effects, and a universe of suggestions that results in the biggest attraction of the work.

Carlos has energy to last for a long time. His contexture, fragile in appearance, encloses a powerful creative vitality and an admirable work capacity, which will give us in the future, innumerable surprises.

Finally, I think that the people from Cuenca must be grateful with him, because he has chosen this city, for which he feels a special affection, to open a new door into his travel through the path of art. Let get close to it with our warmth and with our natural curiosity, to look and to admire all what from Viver’s soul is in these paintings. It is sure than in more than one moment, we will feel that our spirit is identified with his search and his discoveries, his momentary vacillations on the field of darkness and his immediate ability to find the source of light and to learn it.

Let us follow him in this stage of his exploration and tune our sensitivity and our talent to capture the warlike combat in the field of art, not less vehement because it has been repeated for one thousand times, which took place when these works were conceived, between the creator and the signs that came from outside, and the ones that appeared from inside the soul and from the foundation of the work, and attend to the avatar of the man, in this adventure of spirit and color. We need to remember that each painting was like childbirth, a prolonged pain of blood and innards that shack the world, in the middle of hope and inexhaustible joy, and in the most vigorous contraction and tears, the happiness of the child, the luminous cry of the new life.

Cuenca. June 4, 1993.

“… Carlos Viver has obtained deserved success on his expositions, which drawings of satiric lines are worthy to be mentioned, with which he denounces the prejudices and the social aberrations, plays with the deformation of the human figure to obtain the proposed effect , which is directed to the encounter of the psychological root of the character…”

From the history of the Ecuadorian Art – Salvat.

Viver:

“Viver seems to be related to Literature, but with that more tormented and complex of this century. His paintings appear as tales, of intense stories where the textures, in only one stream, by simplifying the anecdotal, or the figure, transmit to us the most enigmatic of the stories, the one of anguish, the one of the isolated and perplexed man.

A deep irony crosses or corrodes those Viver’s paintings, irony that reaches, and reaches us, in the strict anthropomorphic forms in the objects: certain stairs, certain chairs, symptoms, symbols, decantation of atmospheres, of climates of conscience, of a world in an everlasting trance of destruction and rebirth.

Francisco Proaño Arandi. Magazine Caspicara. Especialized Publication in Museums and History of Art. 1993.

Viver’s “Erotomanias” in the Rite of Love.

In the festivity of the bodies that entrap us to wrap us in his fragrance of joy and pleasure.  In his fourteen masterpieces that are shown in the series “Erotomanias” in the new (and well presented) Gallery Chuquiragua, Carlos Viver incites us to be part of the game of love, in which the figures of the bodies, masculine and feminine, are at the same time life and death, fight and surrender, suffering and ecstasy, docile surrender and rebellion.

The disproportionate bodies not only show how good a drawer Viver is, but also his boldness because the strength of his strokes almost reaches the crack. They are like pieces that sink in the cloth, violent “strokes”, originated from the carving, from which he obtains deep textures that notably enrich the masterpieces.  If the bodies are distorted, the faces simply have been erased. This symbolic treatment of men and women surrendered to the act of sex, this is evidence of the maturity that Viver has reached in this theme, mainly because he accomplishes a great difficulty: move with solvency and freedom in the field of eroticism.  The manipulation of space is sober, but maybe with an exception in the Garden of Eden,” in which bodies and nature merge, and rush together in a frantic and desperate orgiastic dance. “Erotomanias” is the diversity of unity inclined to desire, to the sensuality of the naked bodies. Diversity, because the major part of the masterpieces are treated in different ways; they sprout in a natural manner without previous sketches, is as if the bodies themselves structure his space, his color, his trace. This is an exposition which is worth to see.

Viver: A Noctambulist’s Passion

In the middle of the dancers’ anguish, the solitaries’ smoke, the raptures that grow as the night advances, is Carlos Viver, the Ecuadorian painter with so many expositions and national and international prices with drunken and lived early mornings, unexhausted in generosity, owner of a smile that seems to extend through the whole body, of a tenderness that constitutes enough motive so as to not be able to stay alone more than when confronted with the creation in his multiple forms: the painting, the poem, the photograph, the video.

Calros Viver is probably that who incarnates the spirit of the magazine better, moreover that when someone wanted to interview him, many were sure that all the numbers had been dedicated to him, and obviously some time later we found out that Carlitos –as he was called by his associates- was behind each and every page, winking and saving us from forgetfulness and disorder and since he has the gift of ubiquity the mistake was not that much, because as someone assured having seen him unarming himself of violent protection, another affirmed having said goodbye to him while he blended with his mountainous rumor in the Sese  and a third swears having just seen him in his study undertaking one of his work and that is exactly where I found him. He was preparing his work, part of the “Erotomanias” that will be presented at the end of November in Quito.

Before the creation, vendors, typographers, political activists, and public drawers went. His drawings, paintings, and tapings point to that trajectory. At first he took the art as a medium for social transformation, later when he discovered that the gamma was immense, he started with themes that had to do with the absurd, the irrational, the beautiful, and most of all with the erotic and perpetuate searching.

He confesses that the photography and the poetry are things that he does deliberately so as not to explode and be able to continue walking facing pain, love, solitude…

I am self-educated , I have discovered and learned things by myself, I studied up to the sixth grade in the Simon Bolivar school in Quito, I remember professor Andrade clearly, he was crazy, instead of proposing problems on the board, he drew; it was marvelous. Those images stayed with me. My mother also drew and made poetry; I think those were two situations that had plenty of influence in my life. 

Being a painter is a species of luck, working with colors is doing it with sensual elements, it is a possibility to construct worlds with the spiritual power that one has inside.

My style is not to have a style; I have the conviction of creating, of accomplishing something I had not envisioned. I never rationalize what I paint, because reason has breaks and stereotypes that prevent the imagination from flowing.

In my painting I search for a projection of my own reactions, love, pain, sex. I try to obtain truth in my artistic expression that corresponds to the intensities that I experience in my life. In some epoch women were the center of my heart, I searched for the diverse, the intense, the absurd, the sinful, and the virginal.

In some part of my creation the figure loses all of its details, the ornamental and the baroque disappears, they are now shadows, an invisible and denounced presence, possibly a manner of reflecting my own image.

In the series of Las Sillas (the Chairs), I wanted to represent the character with his existential solitude, where parents, friends, and loved ones do not exist. Feeling the permanence in the world, the solitude, the great mystery of being and not knowing…

In my work eroticism that comes from the inner strength of the persons and that projects the realization of many things is detectable. The people that have that spiritual strength are full of energy and vitality to discover love, sex, pleasure.

“Erotomanias” is an interminable master piece; it expresses the unspeakable passions, the sexuality in ecstasies or facing death. There is always an association for the destruction of love, of orgasms, that alikeness between the sexual and death.

I actually search of open forms, there does not exist any description of something in particular, I have accomplished to use symbols in which, in a metaphoric manner, I create situations that have something to do with the erotic, with the energetic part of life itself, with the crispate of desire. The more frequent symbols are totems, fire, animals. In self-portrait there is an evil form or how man captures the prey to posses it, the object of his desire converts to an animal, in the animal of his imagination. In El Jardin del Paraiso (The Garden of Paradise) there is a symbiosis of nature and man, the symbols are loose, fragmented, and I do not search the tremendous or the too excessive.

I have always lived from my work, and I have inclusively committed some sins like having been too compliant with certain things, for example, I painted women when I was in other things.

I suffer with the painting because I do it with my hands, sometimes I have desires to destroy what I have created so that it can be more expressive and correspondent with my desires.

I always aspire to have desires of working, of experimenting, that my vital cycle will not stop, that my interests in life will not end.

Populated with images, metaphors, symbols, after this first approximation to Carlos Viver, he strolled with the certainty that a new dawn in which his smile and then his hug will give me back my passion and the strength with which the creation lives.

Maura Black. Art and Eroticism Magazine. November 1996.

The “Erotomanias” of Viver.

I again recall the Greek poet Hesoido, when he said that in the woman was the fountain of beauty. With the adjective “kalos”, the woman is associated with the grace of Aphrodite and thus, with the curvy enchantments of the sea.  A woman and the sea are, practically, the same in the matter of lines. By nature, Eros dominated the aesthetics conceptions of Hesiodo, who also sustained that the woman represented an “evil beauty”. Maybe this thought anticipated the conceptual conflicts that were to revolve around the woman, a symbol, as it seems, of various mysteries of unexpected surprises. In sum, an evil beauty that goes with the best in life and from which one can deduce the factors that synthesize the fundamental components of beauty as a whole, taken as a projection of nature through its physical aspects of characteristics and colors.  At least that is how Raymond Mayer interprets it in History of the Aesthetics.

The main point is that the woman is present in art universally, marked by thematic persistence which dominated in the epochs and movements. There are a great number of examples, as much as the frozen versions, and also, by determined forms. I would remember off the top of my head, names like Leonardo and Raphael, of Rubens, Ingres and Modigliani.  The woman in company of her partner completes the natural vision of shared eroticism, exactly as it occurs in daily life.

Eroticism is of the brain while pornography is of the body in a form of a show; it is said by those who try to separate these two problematic fields of human behavior.  Stopping in time and not pass from one field to the other, would save the eroticism, which balance of the sensations completes the mission of suggesting and waking, inevitably, thoughts connected to a field of visual perceptions exclusive of each spectator of paintings, sculptures, or literature.

Carlos Viver, painter who each time becomes more of an owner of a personality capable of walking gracefully on the paths of painting, with confidence and complete with happiness, the theme of the woman has been mainly permanent and, of course, moved by an evident creative and technical summit.  We have confirmed this these days much more explicit or more imaginative, much more of an artist, if it could be said, in the series under the title of “Erotomanias” has been presented in the beautiful Gallery of Chuquiragua, which recently opened. In the paintings which make up the series, we have admired a very original conception of the theme of eroticism, of the love in some of his physical compositions, of his sensual and Baroque exhibitions, of his ardent culminations. Viver accomplishes all that with great strength, showing emotions that produce graces to a brilliant composition and a chromatic ostentation that sometimes ties with a type of texture, convoluted and rich are the touch of colors.

Edmundo Rivadeneira. El Comercio. January 5, 1997.

Ecuadorian painting seen in Chile

A fan of most significance of the painting in Ecuador was exhibited in the Museum of Contemporary Art of Forrest Park in Santiago. According to Serge Fohr, critic of art, the Ecuadorian creator Carlos Viver, “paints from impetus impulses, from furious and passionate attacks: there is in Viver a hidden mystery, a search of the remote and distant primitive. In sum, a great poem, a graceful aesthetic, a sincerity without limits.”

Journal La Nacion (The Nation), Cultural Section. Ignacio Iñiguez Santiago. August 31, 1997.

…Of the Ecuadorian artists, Viver is aesthete, the one who lives for art not of his art. He is a powerful creator of fantasies present not only in his paintings and drawings, but also in many others channels of his expressions of his aesthetic anxieties.

Of our artists, he is perhaps, the one who best fits into his character— magisterial definition produced by Cortazar.  He has done, does, and wants to do many things, without stopping to calculate the benefits or consequences, just for the pleasure of doing them; for the vital satisfaction of continuity.