Artist: Pablo Vargas Lugo
New York, December 7, 2000 – January 25, 2001
Pablo Vargas Lugo transforms the Art&Idea space in New York into an empty desert plain where the spectator seems to look upon the elegant and timeless Pyramids of Giza from a bird’s perspective. The only difference is that Vargas Lugo’s pyramids are not made for eternity but assembled of corrugated cardboard – a material too cheap and fragile to withstand four thousand years of heat, sandstorms and rain. Another work, a computer-generated print stylistically inspired by Japanese calligraphy, depicts a satellite stuck in the maze-like branches of a tree. As with the pyramids, Vargas Lugo confuses and manipulates the eye of the spectator by slightly altering points of perspective, turning the horizon upside down and inverting a given perception. Has the satellite – this ubiquitous symbol of communication – fallen from the eternal sky into the tree or has the tree grown so high as to interfere with the satellite’s rotation around mother earth? By the very subtle and minimalist approach Vargas Lugo applies to produce his work, he manages to escape a false romanticism and instead keeps an ironic distance that is more interested in the formal quality of the surface vis a vis given meaning than the possibly fake spiritual content.
