Angel Vergara's Pictorial Turn at Almine Rech Brussels

Angel Vergara presents a new cycle of works at Galerie Almine Rech in Brussels from September 7 to 29, 2012, marking a definitive shift toward painting. Following his monumental video piece 'Feuilleton' that represented Belgium at the 2011 Venice Biennale, Vergara now reduces video projection to a single screen and creates twenty paintings on canvas. The series uses James Joyce's 'Ulysses' as a pretext to explore the dialogue between his films (moving images) and painting (still image). This relationship is described as a contamination of filmed images by painting, which appropriates them onto canvas. In his previous work, the figure was entirely absent in favor of abstract painting on glass, built through successive touches. Now, glass has been replaced by canvas, and figures have returned, still marked by colored pictorial touches. However, these touches have lost the autonomy and abstract power they had on glass, forcing the viewer to engage memory. Here, models and painting are immediately superimposed. The true stakes of Vergara's work lie in these different temporalities: between the time of cinematic montage and that of defining and executing the pictorial image. The exhibition is curated by Bernard Marcelis.