Angel Vergara Santiago Atención! algunas vueltas más para llegar... s_eñ_, m_ _ti_a, c_ub, p_ _pi_ _ad, p_n_l, p_od_ _c_ón, de_c_

Project curated by Juan de Nieves
Since his early steps as an artist, Angel Vergara’s practice has been underpinned by an ongoing rethinking of the methods and conventions normally attributed to painting as well as of the logic of its production and mise en scène. Indeed, Vergara (born in Spain but educated in Belgium, where he lives and works) views painting as a method for the analysis and observation of a reality measured in political, social or geographical terms, although without overlooking other “accidental” dimensions registered by Straatman, the artist’s alter ego. With his whole body shrouded in a white sheet,  Straatman interferes in the public space to perform the task of observation, yet using tools inherent to painting.

His project for Espai d’art contemporani de Castelló is based on the study of the specificities investing local idiosyncrasy from a plural and transversal approach that embraces politics, economy, territory, tourism, cultural heritage and, first and foremost, the notion of community associated with all those aspects. Thus, Vergara adopts the role of a sociologist dedicated to studying a given reality he dissects with the goal of constructing new fictions.

The organisational strategy at the museum is primarily grounded in a questioning of the institutional space and, coopting for this purpose its specific architectural configuration, it is basically confined to the platform projecting out over the interior space of the EACC’s main hall. From that neutral and intentionally empty vantage point, we are given a glimpse, on the ground floor, of a large number of devices and circuits configuring a system of semantic connections created out of eight main fields acting as the root word for new developments.

The word, and central axis for the project, produces an open network of unpredictable relations that the spectator has to build, connecting them with other objectual registers often associated with local heritage or economic production, yet nonetheless without establishing a hierarchical order of any kind.

The new “exhibitive” fiction is articulated akin to a racing circuit alluding to a chance finding in the materials employed for the creation of this project. It is an amateur film shot in 1957 in the city of Castellón of a Biscooter microcars race. The circumstantial event works as a metaphor for the mise en scène of the project. Besides, the film itself is shown in a loop in what is called the “cinema”, a space acting as a sort of antechamber to the area reserved for the “museum”. 

The interventions of the artist in the city (the Straatman performances we mentioned earlier, but also other registers of urban views) as well as a whole series of portraits of public or anonymous characters, have been rendered in a number of video-works on view following a highly specific logic. In all of them, Vergara applies his personal method as a painter, camera in hand, and putting the paintbrush in front of the lens, thus producing images divested of any subjective reading.