Graffiti, comics, Pop, and Sixties counterculture clearly have influenced ‘Victor’. Initially his work reminded me of the late Harvey Kurtzman, founding editor of MAD magazine and creator of the satirical Western comic strip Pot-shot Pete. Or maybe some of the peripheral Basil Wolverton characters in Plop! (the DC Comics answer to MAD), and of course Robert Crumb. But there’s also a bit of Smurfs’ creator Peyo, Mike Judge (Beavis and Butthead) and Matt Groening in the mix.

The artist’s black-and-white drawings are detailed, preciously small, and realized in an obsessive kind of way. His fine-point pen does the outline, tiny dot-work, doodling, and written exclamations, while a heavier marker fills in the zigzag lines and expletives where language becomes drawing and vice versa.

‘Victor’ puts it all together in one big countercultural smorgasbord, as if seen from a panoptic vantage point. South Park mutants, whores and pimps, drug addicts, alcoholics, vagabonds, transsexuals, even Cynocephalus ogres mingle in this bizarre play, and they seem not to mind if their place of residence is Little Havana or Little Odessa. Monsters they may be, but unlike their dragon-and-Medusa counterparts of the Middle Ages, this bunch makes us aware, after Auschwitz and 9/11, of our own banality — what comedian Eddie Izzard refers to as the “everyday trivial-apocalyptic.”

‘Victor’s’ fertile mind borrows from advertising, pinball-machine aesthetics, bubble gum cards, and black-velvet portraits of the Smurfs. Behind the action I can hear Frank Zappa, Sun Ra, and Captain Beefheart, but also Yma Sumac, Perez Prado, and Hector Lavoe. Don’t miss a rectangular storyboard framed against the wall (across from the gallery entrance). It begins and ends with a José Guadalupe Posada motif and involves a phone call and a note reading, “Remember to call about the money.” It’s my favorite.

I’m glad ‘Victor’ employs humor instead of irony. During the Nineties we had plenty of the latter. Self-assertive and vain, irony has become clichéd. These days we need a different mood that can put our lives in perspective. There is something lucid about humor that doesn’t take itself too seriously. As Will Eisner may have once said, paraphrasing Lope de Vega, “Life is a comic strip.

– Alfredo Triff (Art Critic/Jazz Musician)