Angel Vergara

Painting is often considered a static art form. A completed canvas with dry paint departs an artist’s creative studio to be seen by the public. For Angel Vergara, the opposite is true. To paint is to act. It’s not a passive practice, it’s an active one. Throughout his long oeuvre, painting has been a form of constant interaction with visible and invisible forces. By bringing his canvases into the world—out of the studio’s confined, safe walls—he allows them to absorb the environment, continuously changing throughout.

Born in Mieres, Spain, in 1958, Vergara moved to Brussels in 1964. It was in Belgium’s capital that he would soon dedicate himself to the nation’s traditions and become what one could call a true Brusseleir. In an arithmetic series of artists such as René Magritte, Marcel Broodthaers, and Guillaume Bijl, Vergara would be a logical continuation. The common denominator here is the absurd, the often light and comical approach, while always remaining poetic and cognisant of the world at large. This self-awareness, within an art historical setting, as well as his role as an artist in our society, is often the driving force behind his practice. Already during his studies, Vergara attempted to break free from systematic restraints imposed by the art world at the time. The influence of the avant-garde and movements like Dada and Surrealism, but also Pop Art and Fluxus, emerges throughout his career. As Duchamp made it possible for everyone to be an artist when, in 1917, he submitted his ready-made sculpture Fountain for an exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists in New York, Vergara proposes a continuation and extension: for everyone to be art.

It is this thought-provoking environment that drove Vergara out of the enclosed and safe confinements of his studio and into the street, where Straatman was born, a figure that runs like a thread through his future practice. As Straatman, he covers himself with a white sheet, just like how nineteenth-century photographers would capture reality with their view camera. It is once again the central relationship between the artist and the real world. Paradoxically, however, Vergara’s senses are diminished by the white sheet: light still passes through, but forms and shapes are reduced to a minimum, making the artist rely on sounds, sensations, and smells to capture what is going on around him.

Vergara is, above all else, a painter at heart. While his practice encompasses many media, the act of painting is often what guides him. Whether it is a video, performance, or a space transformed into a fictitious setting, he always seems to be creating a tableau vivant, or living painting. This becomes evident in his video paintings. It is this integration of the moving image and the painting that is so essential: the direct interaction between the artist and the images, which he can barely trace and follow, and how his intervention changes our reading of otherwise dry and objective archival footage. The evident storylines get erased, and linear timelines are fractured into new, mosaic realities. These types of video paintings became the core of two pivotal exhibitions in the artist’s career: FEUILLETON in 2011, where he represented Belgium at the Venice Biennale, and the solo exhibition From Scene to Scene in 2017 at the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique.

“I want to reflect critically on the world I live in, I want to take in a position. I simply can't stay neutral in this world. Popular culture has always been part of my work. It allows me to explore less elitist territories, to link art with my, and others', daily life. Action is another element I strongly believe in. Seeing art as an action, is illustrated by my way of painting - I paint on video screens - but also by a part of my work in which I transform art galleries into bars, supermarkets or other places where economic transactions take place. By perturbing these places, I want to question them.”

“Here and now is the time and place” – an interview between the artist and Jasmine De Bruycker, editorial for Base, 10 August 2010.