Diego Vergara Dabbah
Torrejón. Buenos Aires
Diego Vergara presented his first solo show in Buenos Aires, under the title “La existencia está en otra parte” (Life is elsewhere), a phrase excerpted from André Breton’s surrealist manifesto.
Vergara’s paintings reflect the brevity of the borgeois format, but the discreet dimensions of the paintings contrast with the fanta- sy in his landscapes, which seem to have emerged from a dream. In San Lorenzo, a town near the great metropolis of Rosario, there are moments when the wish to transcend the triviality of everyday life turns as dense as the atmosphere in a suffocating day. Then, when desire becomes powerful, dreams and reality become confused. In that imprecise territory of consciousness, fantastic in a certain way without ceasing to be real, art becomes an efficient vehicle for illusion.
Thus, Vergara’s small paintings have given rise to a garden that is completely foreign to the prosaic contingencies that entertain our lives; a garden laden with fruits that exceed the ususal dimensions. The artist does not seek to disturb the viewer and when the fruits become voluptuous, he demurely covers the excess with beautiful color mantles, with cloth materials that appear to have escaped from Flemish paintings. Excess should not alter peacefulness. The delicate appearance of the bluish green forests that resemble Fragonard’s is barely interrupted by some birds of radiant colors.
Before the eyes of the bourgeois, who do not consider art the best occupation, extraordinary things happen. When the weight of one of the fruits threatened to break a bough, Vergara decided to prop it up with colored posts; then he painted a tree that leans against the immensity of a fruit in the sunset. Nothing is known about the inhabitants of the place; their existence may only be traced through the parasols and cushions indolently abandoned in a valley where the peacock saunters around. All seems extremely calm, but in one of the paintings, everything appears to get out of control: hundreds of fruits cover the floor and float on the waters of a lake. The sole idea that such phenomenon may occur is subversive. Will blue roses grow this summer? Breton assured they would, after having battled to bring to light poetic, philosophic and spiritual issues that appear when one observes the world with due intensity. Painting renews its “magic” in distant times and places. You have stolen my heart shows two otters standing face to face in the manner of encyclopedia illustrations; one holds in its mouth the heart that it has literally torn from the other with its teeth.
Perhaps, like Breton adds, “to live and let live are imaginary solutions”. Today, the contemporaneity of Vergara’s work has the dimen- sion of his small private paradise, and the magnitude of an almost imperceptible, yet simultaneously firm and continued, struggle maybe the only acceptable one in present-day society, to defend its ‘shires’ and the greatest of treasures: the capacity to imagine.
