For years, Vicente Hirmas has been exploring—with rigorous craft and inexhaustible passion—a constellation of forms. Together, they outline the contours of a universe as foreign to ours as it is unsettling.

Ancient Egypt, Buddhist Asia, and Pre-Hispanic America form some of the geographical and temporal coordinates that fascinate him. His work summons these references without privileging any one in particular, weaving them into a natural synthesis in which a balanced sense of contemporaneity prevails, alongside a cross-pollination of influences ranging from Goethe’s ideas to the symbolic and formal dimensions of the ancient Aztec ball game—a ritual charged with cosmogonic representations.

These and other elements are approached from the present. Installation, cultural crossings, and the relationship with the exhibition space illustrate the position of an artist fully conscious of the past while keeping his gaze firmly on the present.

Hirmas’s world and his references suggest works that once formed an inseparable whole with the spaces and worldviews that inspired them. Rather than the isolated, autonomous artwork so characteristic of modernity, this sculptor is interested in the connections between his pieces and the environment they interrogate. His is a relational art, closer in its disposition to context than to the pure conceptual logic of the white cube—though the latter is also embraced as part of his language.

It is undeniable that Hirmas possesses a vast repertoire of ancient forms, as well as a deep awareness of Minimalism and contemporary critiques of the metropolitan canon. He resolves these tensions by carving his works by hand—even building several of the plinths on which they stand. In other cases, elemental wooden forms rest upon metallic cubes, establishing a deliberate opposition of shapes and procedures.

His paintings and reliefs suggest a rereading of abstraction, evoking Klee or Hilma af Klint through a materiality attentive to surface, color, and even scent—an experience that engages touch, sight, and smell.

The artist’s figures seem to awaken, to merge into a cosmos of which they are already part, or to fix their expectant gaze on their surroundings. Their powerful eyes—made of horn, mother-of-pearl, and bronze—are set with meticulous precision. These works propose a possible encounter with the supernatural, while avoiding any deliberately illustrative character.

Perhaps for this reason they do not entirely detach themselves from the block to which they belong, as if their geometric structure were as important as the carved forms themselves. Their bodies or heads, carved in wood with the craftsmanship of the sculptor and the ingenuity of the carpenter, evoke both Tenochtitlan and Angkor Wat, confronting us with a paradox: sculptures with ancient features that are at once contemporary; spiritual yet skeptical. They speak of beliefs evoked by a sculptor, not by a believer; by an aesthete, not by a theologian. This is why the image of the temple and that of the museum, archaeology and dystopian future, converge freely—a dialectical exercise whose synthesis remains a reflective task for the viewer.

Within these apparent contradictions—between pure contemplation and ritual—the artist situates his works as questions, and his language as affirmation: for him, artistic practice is a profound form of reflection, and his work an invitation to engage with it.

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Text by César Gabler Santelices
Visual Artist