Cecilia Vázquez (1967) was born and raised in Mexico City. She attended the National University of Mexico, where she completed her BFA. Later on, she earned her MFA in Painting from Massachusetts College of Art in Boston, thanks to the support of a Fulbright grant.
She exhibits her work regularly –both in Mexico and abroad– in museums, cultural institutions, and private galleries. Her sustained practice has granted her a position in the Mexican art-world, having been distinguished in three occasions with the National System of Creators Grant by the National Fund for Culture and Arts (FONCA). She is also part of the Fulbright-García Robles Experts Network, and participates regularly as a jury member for national and international competitions and grants.
For more than 20 years, she has taught at college level in Mexico, the US and Argentina, and has served as Visiting Artist in several institutions in Mexico and the US. She is currently is an Associate Professor at Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston, MA. Before this appointment, she was Tenured Full Professor at the State University of Morelos in Mexico, where she also headed the MFA Maestría en Producción Artística, accredited by the National Register of Quality Graduate Programs. She has also been a Mentor in the Young Creator’s Program (FONCA).
Two monographic books have been published on her work: Fondo, figura y fondo otra vez and Geometría blanda.
Her work is included in public and private collections in Mexico and abroad.
If my practice were to be described in terms of literature, I would identify it with poetry more than narrative or essay, as I am interested in language – in this case, that of painting. Within it, my work seeks to create a visual experience that allows for metaphor, while maintaining a commitment to painterly investigation.
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I encourage representation and invention to collide in order to provoke and discover unexpected connections that articulate personal poetics through strategies particular to painting. I feed off situations stemming from the still life and the landscape, and from the invention of shapes that encourage memories of matters remotely known. I am interested in maneuvering in the interstice of figurative and abstract syntaxes, in order to revalue the image as a territory pregnant with subjective possibilities in terms of imagination.
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Flowers are in the forefront of my work. They appeal directly to my heritage, as in Mexico they are markers of religious and vernacular rituals and celebrations that go way beyond the decorative or the ornamental. Coming from a strict catholic upbringing, my childhood was populated with these images: congregations in which the indigenous and the baroque intertwined seamlessly, concocting images of abundance, generosity, and excess. In the last few decades, flowers in my country have also become a symbol of feminist resistance, and one which I fully embrace.
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In the last few years, the inclusion of three-dimensional pieces has become a very important part of my practice, as I am also interested in the grammar of painting out of its traditional genealogy. The line between two and three dimensions it is not a straight one in my work: it meanders from painting to object and back to flatness again. Allowing –and encouraging– painting to travel back and forth from the two and the three dimensions, to feed each other and also walls or floors and new surfaces, pushes me to pose new questions about the conception of what we understand to be pictorial.
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I understand finished pieces as attempts to solve interrogations that will never be answered in fullness: that it is in themselves where the creative act takes place.
My work, thus, privileges the question over the answer.
