In the first phase of Vigilante's i-Art Movement, E-Mail is My Art, Warhol emails Bill Gates.
I’ve always wondered why professionals far removed from an artist’s creative process are the ones whose theories about his or her art are respected. It is certainly the duty of art critics and journalists to survey the array of works making it onto the “scene” and to choose the pieces they believe worthy of attention, so this article does not fault them for offering their treatises on any particular artist’s oeuvre. But I ask, “What is circumspect about studying an artist’s development close at hand?” Art historians do so, but only consider those who have passed into the mists of time. By then so many of an artist’s thoughts, hopes, desires, wishes and intentions, unless the artist also happens to be a prolific writer, have disappeared with him or her.
I ask those who believe closeness circumvents objectivity to also consider the cliché “familiarity breeds contempt.” It is from somewhere in the middle that I have watched the growth and progress of a particular artist whose creative process has been open to me. His name is Alejandro Vigilante, and he is the founder of the i-Art Movement, which is as dynamically focused on plumbing the depths of popular culture as the Pop Art Movement was during the 1950’s and 60’s. “What’s more pop than internet?” he asks in response to those who inquire as to the title of his movement. As far as he is concerned, the answer is simple: “Nothing.” He also firmly believes that if the Pop Artists were starting their movement today, the internet would figure as strongly in their works as it does in theirs.
As is always important when discussing an artist’s development, a look back into his history is warranted here. Alejandro’s father, Juan Vigilante, turned from a successful career in architecture to painting in 1962. His success ramped up the year Alejandro was born, in 1964, and by 1968 he had gained a modicum of fame, which would likely have continued had he lived more than four years into his new career. That was not to be, as Juan’s star was distinguished that year, when Alejandro was three years old, before he was able to achieve an enduring place as a painter of the new movement of Informalism that was spreading like wildfire in Argentina.
In Listen, Here, Now! Argentine Art of the 1960s: Writings of the Avant-Garde, published by The Museum of Modern Art in New York, Marcelo E. Pacheco wrote an essay titled, “From the Modern to the Contemporary: Shifts in Argentine Art, 1956-1965.” In it he states, “[A]rtists had begun to break free of the self-imposed limitation that ‘works of art’ should look like ‘works of art,’” and “the idea that art history has a single, canonical direction had begun to shatter.” In his conclusion, he goes on to say, “As the decade drew to a close, and the weight of the art scene shifted toward arte nuevo, the main actors either reinforced their territories, withdrew from artmaking, returned to more traditional approaches, left the country, or died young.”
It was his father’s untimely death from a stroke that propelled Alejandro toward an inward search that has always led him back to art. Initially, it was a deep-seated desire to “feel” his father’s presence, so his early works as a child were paintings with an organic abstraction similar to Juan’s. This is certainly fitting, as his earliest years were spent soaking in an environment in which his father was among the Argentine artists shattering the lines between figuration and abstraction. I did not meet Alejandro until he had completed the phase of his career in which abstraction ruled nearly every canvas. There were several conceptual series—one of keys and another of mythological figures buoyed in dense, murky backgrounds—that could certainly have been a further reaching back to understand why his father had been taken from him at such an impressionable age. But this period of abstract devotion came to an abrupt halt when Alejandro hit upon a concept that would come to rule his art until this very day.
In 2001, it occurred to him that the world’s way of communicating had been forever altered by the internet. At that time, the phenomenal shift had been brought about by e-mail. In a brilliant move, the younger Vigilante brazenly proposed what e-mail Marilyn Monroe might have sent to JFK, what message John Lennon would now send to Yoko Ono, and what statement Warhol would cheekily have made to Bill Gates. It wasn’t until 2007, during his first significant solo show, that he realized he had furthered the advancement of a participatory art began by Pop Art’s founders. When visitors to the exhibition chuckled and laughed outright as they walked from painting to painting, motioning for others to have a look, he knew he’d created a dynamic concept as groundbreaking as Pop’s lauded few had done five decades before him.
Argentine critic Jorge Romero Brest wrote in his essay “Report and Reflection on Pop Art” in Listen, Here, Now! that Pop Art’s images were so powerful because they were inclusionary, or “shared by everyone.” This is where Vigilante is most like the progenitors of the Pop Art Movement, as his forays into the virtual world of the internet fix the realities of those he captures with the force of their own ideas and playful suppositions as to what they might have said. His subjects are iconic and are spouting recognizable exchanges, therefore they are equally as inclusionary as Lichtenstein’s comic characters or Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup cans.
In his essay, Brest goes on to admit that he was “less than amazed” and even “disgusted” by Pop Art when he first viewed it. This was due to the “flat and impersonal finish of the works.” He had a nostalgia for the trace of the hand that for millennia had “given character to painted and sculpted works.” Though Vigilante employs a Rauschenberg transfer technique to create his works of art, he departs from Pop Art with his painterly techniques. His transfers are set onto backgrounds that do show the “hand of the artist,” the acrylic-on-wood compositions marked by motion, the colors of which are as important to the whole as the images and messages that are superimposed upon them.
One of the most interesting aspects of Vigilante’s i-Art Movement hinges on the internet, which is so dynamic and ever-changing that there is always something new to consider. When e-mail began to lose its newness to texting and social media, such as Facebook and Twitter, Vigilante effortlessly caught the wave, expanding his repertoire to include departed celebrities posting on each other’s walls and tweeting phrases they would likely have typed into their tweetdecks were they still alive. Even their passwords spring from lives that became fodder for a hungry consumerist society, now addicted to the supposed truths that film, television and the internet expose.
One can only ask, “What will he discover next?” The answer perhaps lies in the scrubbed hallways of Silicone Valley where the internet’s elite are, even as you are reading this, testing their newest advancements. Or perhaps it lies in the explosion of information that Google is continually crawling through to provide searchable data at his fingertips. Or perhaps it exists in that long-ago unrelenting impetus felt by a young boy to capture the brilliance of his father’s fascination with exploring new territory in art. Perhaps, better still, it hums in his incredibly vibrant imagination, which knew the minute he’d hit upon the idea of painting a virtual word that he’d found his mark in life. Will his i-Art Movement stand the test of time? Will he be considered alongside Pop Art’s greats when a survey of history is examined in 100 years? This will be a question for the art historians to ponder once we have all irrevocably passed into the mists of time.
To see a progression of Vigilante's i-Art Movement, take a look at the slideshow below. If you happen to be in New York City on Thursday (December 17), visit Cheryl Hazan Gallery to see Vigilante's works in a group show. The opening is from 6 to 8 p.m. To see his newest works any time, visit Avant Gallery in the Miami Design District.
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