Erick Víquez: Nightglow
September 20 - November 8, 2025
Opening Reception: Saturday, September 27, 12 PM
5613 San Vicente Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90019
Press Release
Erick Víquez (Cartago, Costa Rica, 1993) is a painter whose practice is grounded in the mythopoetic through observations of landscape, literature, and art history. Much of his work focuses on the nature of memory and time, referencing historical and personal archives, popular culture, and literature, to reflect his deep interest in the gothic, colonial, and violent narratives of Latin American history and culture. His images of domestic settings, both historical and contemporary, as well as the rural and tropical environment of the province in which he was raised, are haunting and ambiguous spaces where familiarity collapses and the disturbing seeps into the everyday. His visual explorations of the jungle, the suffocating heat of the tropics, and social violence past and present, are expressions of a regionally specific gothic, where tropical exuberance coexists with darkness and repression.
In his latest oil paintings, the artist extends his exploration of the Latin American Gothic by painting the night as a terrain of ambiguity and charge. The series locates itself in the rural outskirts of Alajuela Province, where moonlight and artificial glows ominously play across dense vegetation. Paths dissolve, leaves radiate, shadows thicken. What emerges is a distinctly Central American nocturne that fuses atmosphere, architecture, and ecology. Here, light is not a clarifying force. Moonlight and artificial illumination do not soothe or stabilize; they unsettle. They cling to foliage, fracture the dark, and cast the walls of modest homes into spectral relief. The familiar countryside becomes uncanny, transformed into a living threshold in which intimacy and estrangement coexist.
Figures also appear in the work—apparitions engaged in enigmatic dealings that unfold under cover of night. Human presence heightens the sense of secrecy and tension, suggesting rituals, negotiations, or hidden narratives only half-disclosed. Fire, too, makes its appearance: not as destructive blaze or useful tool, but as a source of otherworldly luminosity, a counterpoint to moon and electric glow. Together, these motifs intensify the sense of night as a terrain where illumination harbors revelation and foreboding.
This sensibility aligns Víquez with a broader tradition of Latin American painters who have challenged the picturesque expectations historically placed on the tropics. Artists from Armando Morales to José Bedi, and Wifredo Lam, have each reimagined the landscape as something more than fertile abundance or exotic spectacle. Morales’s jungles oscillated between dream and menace; Bedia conjured shadowed cosmologies. Víquez extends this lineage into the nocturnal, insisting that the Costa Rican night is layered, equally capable of revealing deeper narratives.
In doing so, he resists the burdens of the “tropical picturesque”—the expectation that Central America be portrayed as exuberant, colorful, endlessly fertile. His nocturnes expose another register, one that resonates with what critic José Luis González described as lo subterráneo—the subterranean dimension of Latin American life, where history, myth, and present reality intertwine. For Víquez, the rural night is not idyllic but dripping with suspense: banana leaves shimmer with otherworldly glow, and shadow-laden concrete walls suggest secret lives.
The Gothic tradition, when transplanted beyond Europe, shifted its grounds. No longer tethered to ruined abbeys or storm-laden castles, in Latin America it took root in the land itself. Here, the Gothic resides not in architecture but in atmosphere—in the sense that beauty tips into danger, lushness conceals histories of violence, and domestic spaces harbor the uncanny. His paintings capture landscapes in suspension, recalling the spectral ambiguities in the writings of Horacio Quiroga and Silvina Ocampo. He states: “My interest lies in how to materialize that suspension between the melancholic and the numinous, that silence vibrating in rurality as the echo of a Gothic that is not urban, but bound to the countryside and its atmospheres of veiled threat”.
What emerges in Nightglow is both regional and metaphysical. The works are recognizably grounded in the outskirts of Alajuela, where the artist gathered inspiration during regular night walks. But these paintings do not illustrate reality, they interrogate it. Central to the series is an ecoGothic impulse: the rural landscape is not pristine, but technified, managed, and blurred with artificial interventions. Monocultures, altered soils, and production boundaries register in the night as both fertile and estranged, echoing the tensions of modern life where promise and threat, abundance and alienation coexist.
A temporal dissonance also runs through the work. Víquez’s paintings carry an archival, atemporal tone, suggested through his reduced palette of blue-greens, blacks and greys—hues that imply something halted, a pause that opens onto the ominous. The result is a Costa Rican Gothic that fuses atmosphere, architecture, and ecology. In these works, night is neither backdrop nor metaphor, but protagonist: a sentient, ambiguous terrain that glows, resists, and remembers.
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Erick Víquez is Editorial Director for Libros Humildes, where he conducts editorial research on the translation and transcription of literary texts, and Technical Editor for Flores Artificiales, where he conducts artistic research on technical editing and contemporary binding structures and formats. He has served as a research assistant for the Central American Print Collection at the University of Costa Rica and a guest lecturer at the School of Architecture (UCR). His work has been exhibited at Galeria deCERCA and Salita Temporal in San José, Costa Rica, where he was Artist-in-Residence in 2022.
Alongside his practice, he has participated in teaching, research, and editorial work, with experience in book-making, design, and literary projects. His activity extends through exhibitions, collaborations, and publications in Costa Rica and abroad.
His work has been exhibited in Costa Rica, Chile, and London. Nightglow marks the artist’s U.S. debut.