Angel Vergara, Life Illuminations

Angel Vergara questions the way contemporary 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. With his process, Vergara creates a new, suspended reality, grown from the artist’s dialogue with reality and with the image, by which it has already been transformed.

Decontextualised images of reality are mediated by the artist and transformed into art. Thus, the viewer is encouraged to question their way of perceiving the everyday experience and the way it’s presented to them via images. Additionally, the position of the artist is questioned. How can he fill the gap between what is real and what is art? How can he make reality enter art and art enter back into reality?

Vergara’s work is above all transparent—physically, as well as conceptually. The transparent supports on which he paints allow the outside world to intimately become a part of the painting and shape it. Reality is literally reflected and projected onto the painting. Its fleetingness is captured by the artist and concentrated into a gesture with 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.

The exhibition, Life Illuminations, presented a series of “life paintings”, which were made on multiple layers of glass or Plexiglas. These are a few paths that can be followed to interpret Vergara’s exhibition, but as is the case with his work generally, it’s impossible to peel off all the layers of meaning. In these paintings, Vergara parts from the moving images he sees through the transparent support on which he paints from the backside. By looking at the subject of his painting through his own painting whilst it is being painted, the artist doubles the layers of meaning of the image and of the image-making process. Thus, by literally accumulating varied layers of transparent supports the layers of meaning extend to infinity.

The two smallest Illuminations shown in the exhibition were based on a documentary film about the behaviour of lions, whereas the source of their larger pendants is the coincidental projection of what happens in the artist’s studio onto transparent surfaces. They reflect onto the pictorial tradition of the self-portrait. By combining all, Vergara questions human ethology: how does the human condition shine through the artwork?

Like the meaning of his works, the meaning of the exhibition title, Life Illuminations, is not univocal. “Life” emphasises the time-based character of his paintings and points out the direct, instantaneous process by which the moving image is transformed (live) into art. Additionally, it denotes the overlapping of art and reality/life.

In the title, the word illumination refers to light—both to the physical light of projection and reflection and to mental light—the almost hallucinatory effect the act of painting has on the artist. Of course as a title, Vergara’s Illuminations reflect Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations, the title of his collected masterwork suite of prose poetry, which was later given the subtitle, Painted Plates. Illumination also makes a reference to medieval illuminations, often comprising multiple parts of a story into one contemplatively painted image. Ancient monks meticulously painted according to certain traditions of the image, but unavoidably, also added a subjective touch. With these works, Vergara brings down the daily flux of images to the speed of the medieval illumination.