Angel Vergara - In the Instant

Exhibition catalogue Angel Vergara - In the Instant, presented at MACS' Grand-Hornu, Belgium (April 23 - October 8, 2023).

Taking the work back to the drawing board, constantly marking and erasing the canvas, stubbornly penetrating it and inhabiting it to the point of melting into it, these are the features and ‘line of flight’ of Angel Vergara’s magnum opus. Indeed, Vergara’s original act, initiated in the 1980s, of covering himself with a white sheet – as if it were a blank canvas or a ghostly shroud – filters and transposes into sketches a whole urban ecology and an economy of human exchanges (be they commercial, cultural, political or artistic). Thus, in addition to drawing on the agility of the brush, the fluidity of colour and the freedom of a canvas sometimes shared on the ground with other participants, Straatman, the artist’s alter ego, resorts to the ingenuity of multiple hybrid devices and assemblages to produce work in the form of an allegory of painting and in direct contact with reality.

Angel Vergara was born in Mieres, Spain (1958). He lives and works in Brussels, Belgium.