And Yes I Said Yes I Will Yes

The Almine Rech Gallery, Brussels is pleased to present – for the first time and throughout its exhibition space – a new solo exhibition by Angel Vergara (Mieres, Spain, 1958). In the wake of his much discussed installation "Feuilleton, the Seven Deadly Sins"for the Belgian Pavilion at the latest Venice Biennial, Angel Vergara is pursuing the exploration he initiated some years ago.

Vergara edits and assembles images drawn from the media that serve to frame the act of painting, an activity that follows the temporality and movement of the images.The artist gradually paints over them in an unyielding act of concealment, while the images can thus regain, in a sense, the color, thickness and consistency they may have lost.

Proceeding by means of discrete or pronounced interventions, and using various instruments, the painter’s activity gradually immerses itself in the images, outlining them, underlining them, pursuing them. If it seems to us that he can never catch up with them, this is precisely because the artist wishes to highlight another temporality, to give shape to the necessary gap that gradually distances us from the images and transports us into the creative process underlying a work of art.

Angel Vergara’s new project invites us to enter the world of one of the great works of literary modernism. While the words “and yes I said yes I will Yes” are borrowed from the closing line of James Joyce’s novel Ulysses, for Vergara they also serve as a pretext to proclaim, over and over again, the feeling of jubilation with regard to painting.

It is in the wake of Joyce’s narrative that Angel Vergara constructs his own fiction and, thanks to a new video composed as if it were a casting, calls up the celebrities that fill our screens from morning to night. Leonardo DiCaprio, Isabelle Huppert, Lady Gaga and many more become characters in this odyssey. They travel through places that are specific to the artist’s imagination and also serve his own temporality, a painterly journey through the flow of images.

It is this circulation which the artist’s application of color emphasizes and pursues and sometimes records, like snapshots, in a series of paintings staged in the gallery’s space. ??Through a specific layout designed by the artist, visitors are invited to undertake the journey, to let themselves be guided on this voyage through the present age and its established signs and models. Resting on the visitor’s sense of vision, this journey leads viewers toward that aesthetic horizon that contains the possibility of an emancipated painting, the promise of infinite possibilities.

The gallery is presenting in an adjacent room, the seven videos which, screened simultaneously, compose "Feuilleton, the Seven Deadly Sins". This installation will be visible from Sept. 16, 2012 until March 10, 2013 at the ZKM Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe as part of the rerun of ARTandPRESS, an exhibition that was recently shown at the Martin Gropius Bau in Berlin.

Source: Almine Rech Gallery