Angel Vergara

The downpour of rain outside Axel Vervoordt Gallery in Hong Kong’s Central district on a recent day was a fitting accompaniment to the artwork currently on display there. The city’s unpredictable weather had also made it difficult for Brussels-based artist Angel Vergara during an earlier attempt at creating his site-specific installation Landscape (2015). When the clouds did part, and the sun came out, the artist was able to film the seven-minute video, with cameras set to record from two perspectives: one perched high on Victoria Peak overlooking the bay; and the other on the opposing side from Kowloon, gazing up towards Hong Kong Island. Vergara’s first solo show in Hong Kong is comprised of this one installation, which uses film and paint to interrogate images at the most fundamental level, focusing on what makes an image and how viewers process its aesthetics.

Depending on the timing of entrance into the gallery space, one could easily mistake the two-and-a-half-by-three-meter LED work for a large-scale landscape painting. Within seconds, though, drips of opaque paint slowly cascade down the screen, giving way to a distant skyscraper, a Chinese strawberry tree and the slow movement of a boat making its way across the harbor. An interesting mix of hand-painting and post-production techniques were utilized to create the video work. Doubling over the camera’s lens, the artist held up glass supports, onto which he applied daubs of lilac, blue and white paint, and gashes of deep oranges and red, that reflected the changing skyline. He then edited his hand out of the shots to make the paint streaks appear as ghostly apparitions across the screen.

There is also something personal to be detected in Vergara’s installation, a sense that the artist is working through the material in the process of overlaying painterly techniques with real landscapes. In an interview in 2010 Vergara explained that his preoccupation with paint was a symptom of growing up in an environment where the primary art discourse was the “death of painting,” which evidently spurred his interest rather than hindered it. His captivation with the act of painting was evident early on in his career: he performed Straatman, featuring a character who paints in public, during the 1988 Venice Biennale. For the work, Vergara sat in the Giardini blanketed in white canvas cloth. While some may have seen this as a radical act, which drew local police attention and concerns for his health, underneath the fabric Vergara was simply sourcing optimal conditions in which to paint; “…my whole body was open to light and I painted what was happening around me…reacting, detecting…my psychology and imagination were expanded.”

There is a soothing quality to the work, though not merely for its tranquil colors and dreamy scenes. In a largely ocular-centric society, much of the content we consume daily are sequences of images delivered to us via television, billboard ads or mobile phones. These neat packages of information comprise photographs and graphics that, while direct and instantaneous in their message, have resulted in a psychological shortcutting of how we digest the visual. Oftentimes we become numb to the everyday images we encounter, just by virtue of the immediacy and the amount we receive, an experience that Vergara maintains skews our memory. From this perspective, Landscape, his hybrid film-painting, attempts to slow down the speed in which the contemporary image is absorbed. Vergara both displays an image of Hong Kong’s landscape and obscures it, making an immediate, graspable snapshot of it elusive. In watching this, even if simply trying to discern what one is looking at, the slow infusion of the two realities on screen—landscape and paint—add a meditative quality to the work.

The transparent way Vergara’s research manifests in his action-based works is refreshing. The artist uses a non-esoteric visual language to explore in Landscape what makes a representation and how we process it—a recurrent, but necessary theme for artists who acknowledge themselves as image-makers.

Angela Vergara’s solo exhibition is on view at Axel Vervoordt Gallery, Hong Kong, until May 12, 2016.