Angel Vergara WE, THE WORKS OF ART

Laurent Courtens, Sarah Gilsoul, Juan De Nieves, Daniel Vander Gucht, Angel Vergara

The work of Brussels-based artist Angel Vergara (°1958, Spain) is a continued research into the power of the image. By means of performances, videos, installations, paintings and drawings he tests the limits of art and reality. He questions the way the contemporary image shapes the intermingled public and private spheres and so our own reality. Every work is an attempt to break through the image and to make its impact on an aesthetic as well as a socio-cultural and political level. With his work, Vergara creates a new, suspended reality, grown from the artist’s personal dialogue with reality and with the image by which it has already been transformed. This book makes it abundantly clear: the work of Angel Vergara is polymorphic, voracious, elusive. It involves public action, words, rituals, history, institutional criticism, the assembly of archives, the setting up of environments, the arrangement of relationships... Its fuel, however, its primary necessity, is painting, the desire to hold it together today, to inscribe it in the magma of images, cities and crowds. The need to make it into a living and active material, able to meet the movements of the present, to work on the layers of history, to presuppose — in actuality — the possibilities in the making.

‘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 les elitist territories, to link art with my, and others’, daily life.

Action is another element I strongly believe in. Seeing art as an action, I paint on video screens — I transform art galleries into bars, supermarkets or other places where economic transactions take place. By perturbing these places, I want to question them.’

— ANGEL VERGARA, 2010

ISBN 9789463936231