Amicale

Leonardo Vargas. Peintures: 2019-2022

BIOGRAPHY

Leonardo Vargas, born in 1982 in Colombia, holds a Master of Arts degree from the Hogeschool voor de Kunsten Utrecht in the Netherlands and a programme in history and theory of modern and contemporary art.

He is also a member of the research team ACCRA (Contemporary Approaches to Artistic Creation and Reflection) in Strasbourg where he has been developing his artistic practice since 2016.

His paintings have been exhibited in galleries and institutional spaces in France, and abroad in Germany, Netherlands, Luxembourg, United States among others. Among his exhibitions we can count : 

- Pop-Up Gallery , at the Fernet Branca Foundation, Saint-Louis France, presented by the Bertrand Gillig Gallery (2022)

- Chanson d'Automne. Paintings (In)connues. Oct/Nov 2021, solo-show at Galerie Bertrand Gillig

- Luxembourg Art-Week, International Contemporary Art Fair, Main section, with Galerie Bertrand Gillig

- Portraits", solo-show at CubeExpo, Permanence of the Deputy Sylvain Waserman, Vice-president of the French National Assembly, in collaboration with Galerie Bertrand Gillig (until 30 April 2019)

- Artlab". Gallery Benjamin Eck (Munich, Germany. June 2018)

PRESENTATION OF THE WORK :

Leonardo Vargas' work explores the poetic and plastic possibilities of images found in different media (magazines, books, photographic archives, internet) to create a connection with the viewer. He aims to empower an experience of the visual based on the terrain of sensation. Thus, the relationship with the image would go beyond its utilitarian approach to the simple consumption that is often accompanied by the act of dragging visual content onto a screen. 

To this end, his work explores the possibilities of painting as an agent of visual transformation. By establishing a dialogue between image and painting, he confronts "the technical outcome that makes these images unrealistic... to find the human in its heartbreak "* . This dialogue proposes a sort of continuous becoming where the image is often brought to the territory of the unforeseeable, even the unknown. 

* Extract from the article "NOUVEAUX POSSIBLES: Leonardo Vargas, l'œuvre au-delà de l'image" LEBLANC, Véronique. Revue " Or Norme " # 45, June 2022.

Details of presented works:

Photo 1: "Aria" Huile sur mdf. 100 x 120 cm

Photo 2: "Sans titre" (note d'archive) Peinture à l'huile sur mdf. 61 x 45 cm.

Photo 3: "Sans titre" (note d'archive) Peinture à l'huile sur mdf. 90 x 70 cm

Photo 4: "Aria" Peinture à l'huile sur mdf. 120 x 100 cm.