LnS GALLERY is honored to present Tony Vazquez-Figueroa’s solo exhibition Petropias, a culmination of three years of work by the multimedia artist. This immersive collection of paintings, photography, and sculptures will enrapture the audience in the artist’s interpretation of the worldwide impact of the petroleum industry. Petropias is Vazquez-Figueroa’s second solo exhibition at LnS Gallery and is curated by Tami Katz-Freiman.

Vazquez-Figueroa is an internationally trained, Miami-based artist, born and raised in Venezuela. His deeply personal investigation into how oil-rich countries create unique physical environments, like oil refineries, and peculiar socio-economic and cultural environments led to the formation of Petropias, a term coined by the artist.

As elaborated on by Tami Katz-Freiman in the accompanying catalogue essay, “Venezuela, as viewed through Vazquez-Figueroa’s critical eyes, is neither a utopia nor a dystopia, but rather a heterotopia (from the Greek hetero=different, and topos=place), a term employed by the French philosopher Michel Foucault…Foucault attends to the manner in which those excluded from the public sphere are defined within clearly circumscribed  spaces that compromise, and sometimes even negate, their power and their very identity.”

This becomes the undercurrent of the exhibition. Vazquez-Figueroa’s adapted Petropias, plays on the petrostate, revolving around the idea of holes, refineries, and containers that are revealed by structurally and metaphorically through methodologies that are innovative and challenging exemplifications of craftsmanship, artistry, and science.

In culmination, Vazquez-Figueroa declares, “I lived in a Petropia (Venezuela) and I learned to love it and understand it with its enormous defects and my enormous voids. I was ‘thrown into a world,’ into a Petropia, and found my way around it, escaping some of the terrible ideas that were imposed upon me.”