:. hiraya.com : francisco pellicer viri

In the years he has been exhibiting—almost exclusively at Hiraya Gallery since the 80’s, Francisco Pellicer Viri has zealously kept to himself, i.e., remained as private as a recluse in his paintings. Nurturing the favored persona of the intellectual snob, he has only allowed certain biases, particularly against ascientific knowledge and Catholicism, to express his inner distress (Catholic Problem and Other Heresies, 1998). No family squabbles, no personal traumas, no rocky interpersonal relationships. To acknowledge any such thing is to be shamefully mundane. His pictorial style, outlinish and non-descriptive, assures him a sort of cryptographic cover enhanced by his titling, imaginative yet almost self-consciously abstruse.

Not much has changed with The Quiet Mutilations (ca. 2000), except, perhaps, its concession to the personal element in the artist’s creative inspiration. Viri is human, after all, not his own iconic caricature altogether. Still, a meaningful interpretation of any of the individual works that comprise it remains elusive, and often baffling. Pass up the oxymoronic The Simple Complexity or the wretchedly pompous The Creature from the Glorified Experience, and just settle for the "plain" Protocol for Everyday Confusion, The Scratched Fusion, or The Spiritualized Autopsy, and The Quiet Mutilations may well be a tragi-comic exercise in intellectual masochism.

And in Through a Prism, Darkly (ca. 2001), where his better self yields, if grudgingly, to the persistence of reality-both within him and outside of him, the tension can lead to turmoil, and it shows.
Perhaps it does so, most eloquently, in The Inside Tangle, one of the works in the collection: seemingly self-directed, the visual metaphor, immersed in brooding red, presents a figure-distinctly Viri, that appears like a human wreck.

It also corresponds to the "deterioration" that, he says, is taking place in his life.

Initially, Viri speaks blandly of the creative turmoil he has undergone as "a process of spiritual dehydration," but, later, he comes around to being starkly clinical about it, describing the process itself as "the release of psychotic feelings."

Unlike in his earlier paintings, Viri has put to greater use in "Through a Prism, Darkly" his oil-based pencil, either for embellishment or for dramatic highlights.
Its other use, he confesses, has been symbolic:

"A method of replacing a knife with it."

(Luckily, in art, nobody gets bludgeoned to death.)

"Through a Prism, Darkly" is one solo exhibit where, in terms of self-expression, Viri comes closest to being "human," without necessarily abandoning his oxymoronisms, among other things.