Is a visual and textual artist living and working between Mexico City, Weimar and Berlin, Germany. His work moves between sculpture, words, installation and body.
Victor is the 2026 recipient of Biennial x Salón Acme Residency Award. In partnership with Salón ACME in Mexico City, the Salón Prize offers one of their participating art week artist’s a residency in Colorado.
Victor will spend four weeks in Denver hosted by Biennial of the Americas, creating a sculptural diary in aluminum. He will translate his walks, encounters, and observations across the city into new works made throughout the residency.
Víctor del Oral
“I am a textual artist moving through sculpture, language, installation, and the body. My work reveals the vulnerability and transience of writing systems and supports, questioning the limits of communication.
I see writing as a craft that binds geometry and viscera, and identity as an ongoing negotiation between language and landscape. I build inhabitable texts through performative mechanisms.
Through neologisms and installations, I shift words toward their material dimension, unsettling dominant Western writing forms—including the alphabet. For the past 10 years, I have developed “Lectoesculturas”: living texts that fuse body, space, and writing”
- Víctor del Oral
A City in Translation: Víctor del Oral’s Denver Residency
What happens when an artist encounters a city through its signs, architecture, streets and language?
During his time as Biennial of the Americas’ Artist in Residence, Mexico City-born artist Víctor del Oral explored Denver through the lens of a practice that moves between sculpture, writing, installation and the body. At the center of his work is an ongoing fascination with language, not only with what words communicate, but with their physical forms, structures and limitations.
Denver quickly became part of that exploration.
During his first 24 days in the city, Victor created 24 drawings inspired by bike rides through Denver, particularly RiNo and downtown. The resulting Denvers series (Home Alone 1–25) draws from the city’s architecture, graffiti and visual landscape. Using the negative spaces of letters, Victor cut and rearranged fragments of familiar forms into new compositions, transforming pieces of language into patterns, structures and imagined worlds.
His time in Denver also continued a larger investigation that runs throughout his practice: the vulnerability and impermanence of writing itself. In works created during the residency, Victor turned to aluminum and physical acts of inscription, imagining what writing might become in a future where today’s digital systems no longer exist. For him, materials associated with the present could someday become artifacts of it.
That experimentation could be seen throughout his Denver studio, from works inscribed into aluminum to SLOWRITING and his ongoing fakebook project, which transforms books into wearable objects and asks viewers to reconsider the relationship between writing, the body and communication.
Together, the works offer a glimpse into what an artist residency can make possible: time to observe a place closely, encounter it at a different pace and allow a new landscape to enter an existing artistic practice. For Victor, Denver became not simply the backdrop for the residency, but material for the work itself.
For more information on Victor’s residency and artworks for sale visit his portfolio here.
