FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

LnS GALLERY presents
Black Surface – The Undoing Process
by Tony Vazquez-Figueroa
NEW EXHIBITION | MAY 19 – JULY 7, 2018

MIAMI, FL (May 2018) LnS GALLERY is pleased to present Miami-based multidisciplinary artist Tony Vazquez-Figueroa’s exhibition: Black Surface – The Undoing Process; curated by Jose Antonio Navarrete.

Tony Vazquez-Figueroa is an artist with a complex and interesting trajectory: he was born in Venezuela in the 70s, graduated from Emerson College with a BFA in Film and Television, and went on to become an awarded copy writer and Creative Director in the Advertising world. He later returned to art studies at the San Alejandro Academy of the Arts in Cuba and received a scholarship to attend the prestigious New York Studio School and the Slade School of Painting at the University College of London. Vazquez-Figueroa weaves suggestive connections that outline the eclectic panorama of the reality we inhabit.

Vazquez-Figueroa visits all these experiences – and his Venezuelan history – and draws lines that unify the most diverse subjects utilizing as a common denominator the material that has defined our times: crude oil. He uses crude oil in its most varied forms, from bitumen – the heaviest and most viscous material on earth – used in creating his sculptures, to the lightest petroleum for his drawings. As Jose Antonio Navarrete describes, “Vazquez-Figueroa handles a set of complex references in his body of work, among which are, on the one hand, seen from the perspective of artistic practices, the Venezuelan constructivist tradition and, in particular, that of black paintings in the modern and contemporary Western tradition, from Kazimir Malevich to Frank Stella. However, originally formed in advertising, and with a proven history of identification with modern technologies of image production such as photography and video, he also moves with dexterity and total self-assurance through this heritage when developing his artistic discourse. It is precisely in this crossing between one of the abstract and figurative traditions that his work mobilizes its meanings.

His series Black Mirror Box and Black Mirror Painting, for example, which are the best evidence of an abstract and minimalist pictorial construction, have not been conceived, however, so that they ultimately function as repertoires of abstract works. The reflective quality of the bitumen -in the first- or resin -in the second- make each work a sort of mirror in which the viewer is reflected. That is to say, each painting includes the spectator as a momentary and provisional component of its own constitution as a work. Undoubtedly, this is one of the most suggestive features of these pieces as pictorial representations that, in their perceptive instability, mobilize reflection on identity problems, something of great interest for the general expository proposal of Vázquez-Figueroa.”

Tony Vazquez-Figueroa comments, “Black Surface is about our pulsion toward ‘Destruktion’ – (Heidegger) -yet, in the arts it is precisely that pulsion which is the basic and primordial ingredient for creation and perception. In a way, the ‘undoing process’, the ‘Destruktion’, is a double movement of simultaneous affirmation and erasure.”

The exhibition features a selection of drawings, photographs, sculptures and paintings by the multidisciplinary artist and includes a large-scale installation. Black Surface – The Undoing Process is accompanied by a 36-page exhibition catalog with Essay by Curator Jose Antonio Navarrete and Introduction by Carol Damian, Ph.D.

PREVIEW RECEPTION
Saturday, May 19, 2018
6:00 – 9:00pm

EXHIBITION ON VIEW
May 19 – July 7, 2018