Artist: Pedro Vasconez
La Gotera (The Leak), 2005
Pencil on paper
17 1/4” x 11 1/2”

I personally think that chaos is the only law in nature.
We, as humans try to establish an order and laws to cope with the anxiety of death and the unavoidable fate we all face. It makes our lives miserable and we ought to get used to it. I struggle with thoughts like these all the time, and always end up saturated and confused by the fact that what I see around me is totally different to this. It’s chaos but badly handled. It’s unnatural chaos. It’s controlled chaos. So, as I am totally unable to do something about this insanity that gets me low, makes me feel impotent. I filter every thought into the paper. As for technique and medium, I’ve got used to work with pencil and paper, I enjoy the enormous possibilities that pencil and mind offer and the mood that the grayscale tones give to my works. Combination of organic forms with geometric perspectives, human faces or hands, contrast in value, use of vanishing points and various light sources. There really is no message to give, no one to hear it. It’s just something that came out of my mind. Kinda like the automatic drawing concept (Masson). In this particular piece I used the concept learned from graphic design that white space is as important as used space. The bottom is an attempt of using white space to balance the dense, busy happening that I constructed inside the implied smiling face. And to tie both together, I used the idea of the droplet falling to the little puddle, which gives the name to the work as it might be the leak (gotera) in humanity's smiling foundation, and the reason for our destruction. That’s just one interpretation . . . look at it however you want.