Victor Cauduro Rojas

Color of Time
Sequence of the History of the Baja California Peninsula

Victor has eyes that see big. He sees reality and magnifies it, photographing it, looking for precision, sure; however, through his brush little children and adults acquire other proportions. A woman’s hair, spheres, hands, feet and heads enter his world and become phenomenons. His cracked empty landscapes and the compacted sand of the ground have something of Dali and De Chirico.

Victor Cauduro Rojas holds in his eyes the eternal question, why?. Suddenly it seems that he' s not satisyed with first appearences and gets closer to be able to see things better. He knows there are no absolute answers: his questions are about time and origin of life. Nevertheless, he takes a brush and tries an answer himself by giving form and color to his dreams, even if the result is sometimes terrifying, as with acid rain.

As Frida Khalo painted her broken spine or her deer loins pierced by arrows, Victor stops time in hollow broken empty women, resembling mannequins. His colors are the indigo blue of Mexican houses, the green metamorphosis of rust and saltpeter, becoming moldy with seawater. His frozen images seem to regain life hurting us at the same time with their inexorability, like his imitations of a fragmented Christ left behind by the every day's rush.

To live in the South-end of Baja California, where the sea and the desert become siblings, has given his work a constant: sand and water. Experts define his painting as neo-surrealist, as if in a moment’s notice the sea would leave the painting flooding the gallery.

He has achieved a surely perfect technique, and maybe there is my only problem with his work, I could have preferred more fragility, hesitation, a question about himself and the universe. I wonder if his images: that woman creating the sea from the desert or the other that lost her head and opens her legs to create humanity, wouldn’t prefer it too.Are we, all mothers, like that? We give birth and loose half our bodies? Is the birth a scream in an immense high barren plateau where desert and mountains are merciless witnesses?

In the Historic Sequence by the painter, starting in the era of cavemen, continuing with the evangelic missions in Baja California burning under the sun, a tourist sees in his digital camcorder not only the time and its rush but all the history of America as if it could be reduced to a Swatch clock with inaudible beats. He sees it as a Polaroid he will glue later in his photo album. However, the blood is there under the sand and the cactus, and the blood-red brand new car runs over it, and its joy is chanted by the Michoacan ice-cream cart, our only presence in this world of glass and plastic. Oh, my beloved Mexico! Victor amplifies and breaks it, exploding its back and feet, breaking its skin. His brush is a stiletto fragmenting man, separating his head from the crucified body where three identical featured hurried men walk by inadvertently.

Victor Cauduro’s painting is cruel; it hurts us and because of it, remains in the depths of our memory.