Vargas-Suarez Universal. Ancient vibrations in the Cosmos
Carlos E. Palacios
One of the historical competitions among the arts is that which takes place between music and painting. This paragone, as it is known since the Renaissance, rendered visual results in rhetoric discussions regarding the superiority of one of the arts and its associated corporal senses. For Leonardo da Vinci the eye was the most important asset, and the ear came in second: “it becomes noble listening to things the eye has seen”.
What Vargas-Suarez Universal proposes stems from a transversal place, located precisely in the last link of the genealogy of such tension between music and painting. Beyond any other allegory, his most recent work adds a special impulse to the geometrical plots that characterize his polyhedral work, and that is given precisely by the idea of vibration that as a conceptual gesture deploys his artistic proposals.
Regarding stringed instruments, the vibrational gesture produces...sound and in the same way as in the visual arts, it is the formal mechanism that generates movement. Think of the long tradition of Latin-American synthetism to have a very eloquent idea of the virtual place of vibration in art.
In this line of ideas one would have to think about the oscillations in the work of Vargas-Suarez Universal from the standpoint of Latin-American abstraction's geneology. Different to the artists linked to this historical moment of continental art, the paintings and drawings of Vargas-Suarez Universal do not intend to generate sensations derived from their representation. To the contrary, their participation activates more as a concept than as a mechanism for visual image. The paintings and interventions made under this idea –and that are linked to one of the greatest topics of his work, which is the Cosmos- reveal tension points from the plots, vectors and surfaces that become part of the space, as maps of the energy that emanates from the vibration gesture of an ideal plane, where the oscillatory action is modeled as a way of thinking. On the other hand, the work of this artist becomes part of the art field of our days as an archaeological practice, not only around the vibration but also in regard to the image of the universe moved by energy. An energy that is activated in lines, diagrams and tensors that these paintings, drawings and interventions of Vargas-Suarez Universal make visible from an inscription on any surface, as a historical tapestry: a gesture that is modern and that pursues the idea of an entire work of art, even when the visual and conceptual result are inscribed on the more reflexive symbolic scenery of contemporary art.
This archeological sense that Vargas-Suarez Universal imprints on his work is manifested in a double recovery: on one hand and as we say, the strategies of modernity regarding the link between the arts (the celebrated paragone at the beginning of these lines) and on the other hand an archetype where science fiction, the space race of the Cold War, its interventions and machinery, are part of the battle for the Universe: think of those diagrams that depict old machines that we see in the movies of those days or in the traces left by the astronauts and the spaceships on their spacewalks. These machines draw geographical representations form drawings and lights, such as submarine tracers or the Soviet Sputniks in their spatial stations: this topic is also on of his main features in his more current work.
The abstract landscapes of Vargas-Suarez Universal crystalize a reflective and cultured poetic of these worlds of popular culture that were not alien to modern art: precisely those topics of the universe and energy vibrations that moved many poetic marches of the 20th century artists and who were the Latin American creators that enriched this symbolic network between technology, the idea of the near future and the abstraction to which Vargas-Suarez Universal is added from our times in a diaphanous, authentic and overall intensely original manner.
Entrada actualizada el el 18 abr de 2015
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