Angel Vergara

Angel Vergara’s work is a continuous research and exploration into the power of the visual image. By means of performance, videos, installations, and paintings, Vergara questions the way images shape our reality. Each work is an attempt to break through the image and bring its impact to the surface on aesthetic, as well as socio-cultural and political levels. His mediation and transformation of images is also a questioning of his position as an artist. How can he expose and fill the gap between what is real and what is art? How can he make reality enter art and art enter back into reality?

In spite of the opacity of that gap and these questions, Vergara’s work is transparent—physically, as well as conceptually. The transparent supports on which he paints allow the outside world to become a part of the painting. Reality is literally reflected and projected onto the painting. Its fleetingness is captured by the artist and concentrated into a gesture—a stroke of paint.

Vergara’s paintings hide nothing. There’s no denial of their creation process. There are no hidden meanings beneath their surface. Though parting from (the image of) reality, his newly created images become autonomous objects that break through the ready-made narrative of his references. They’re open to new interpretations and new modes of signification.

Vergara’s paintings comment on the abundance of images that are continually forced upon us, which block the psychological mechanisms by which we shape our reality. The plenitude and the speed of the contemporary image both make it almost impossible to distinguish between fiction and reality. Our memory is polluted. Vergara’s work slows down the speed of the contemporary image to the time of painting. For a brief moment, it freezes the flux and encourages the viewer to take on a critical position towards the image as a referent of reality.

For this exhibition, in the fall of 2015 he travelled to Hong Kong to make the work Landscape. This work is a seven-minute video loop that was shown on a 2.5x3 metre LED wall. Vergara chose to film and subsequently paint over two opposing views. The first view plunges from the Victoria Peak panorama into the bay and faces Kowloon and the Chinese mainland. The second is planted in Kowloon and overlooks Hong Kong Island.

Whereas the first views are predominated by a strawberry tree, fog, clouds, air movements and ghostly apparitions resembling a dragon, the second is particularly occupied by Victoria Peak and the sky, wind, water and its currents, as well as the foggy apparition of a boat. Both show electrical lights in the night. Just as the liquid paint highlights the fluidity of the clouds and water, the respiration-like pace of the montage accentuates the flowing of the wind. His paint strokes and video editing mirror the constituting elements of the landscape.

Vergara’s video work is full of contrasts. It continuously alternates between opposites—between the antique and tactile act of painting, and its digital registration and presentation; between abstraction and figuration; between a painting mounted as a film and a film mounted as a painting; between the time-shaped appearance of a landscape and its contemporary state; between a bird’s-eye and a worm’s-eye view; between night and day.