Angel Vergara

Born in 1958 in Mières (Spain), he lives and works in Brussels. 

History has its own rhythm, and so does art

Angel Vergara studied art at the École de Recherche Graphique (ERG) in Brussels. Already, in the early 1980s, he worked in a great variety of media, including drawing, video, installation and performance. For him, however, these are above all ways of revisiting painting. “Born into a working class, immigrant background,” says Vergara, “I have always believed in the act of painting.” Audiovisual media soon became increasingly prominent in his work, whether for keeping a record of his “pictorial” performances, or for making anonymous videos.

The video installation shown at Toulouse, Feuilleton - les sept péchés capitaux, comprises seven screens showing topical or archival images. Brushstrokes made by the artist “attack” the surfaces of the screens with colour, like the irruption within the nervous system of a collective History, of a singular, personalised, almost disrespectful trace, coming close to signifying, if not indifference to the events, at least a desire to stand back. This frieze, a powerful visual allegory, also expresses the power of art – its capacity for investment, and by the same token its capacity for disinvestment. The uninterrupted theatre of images which, in our media-driven age, defines the vaguely material substance of history is one thing, the power of art and its own prodigal images is another. Presented in the Belgian Pavilion at the 2011 Venice Biennale under the title Feuilleton, this work has the effect of a powerful antidote to the invasion of our minds by proliferating historical facts (the “CNN Effect”). The Belgian painter Luc Tuymans, whom Vergara chose as his curator, sees this work as a “reflection on the theme of the Seven Deadly Sins, such as envy, anger and intellectual laziness.” He argues that “To use this theme as a leitmotiv applied to current society, is really to inoculate a kind of virus into the range of images that current events lavish us with, in all their triviality.” 

Angel Vergara’s group shows include: Ripple Across the Water, Watari Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (1995), Fetishimage, Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam (1997), Indoor, Musée d’Art Contemporain, Lyon (1999). In 2011 the artist took up the invitation to represent Belgium at that year’s Venice Biennale. His recent solo shows include Angel Vergara, We, the art works’, in Brussels and Lisbon (2005), The Straatman's contract, BLAC, Brussels (2006) and Actes et Tableaux- retransmissions, MAC Grand Hornu, Belgium (2006). In 2008 he showed at Art Basel.