Vargas Suarez Universal: Three Projects
through December 2005
Jersey City Museum
350 Montgomery Street
Jersey City, NJ 07302
201.413.0303
www.jerseycitymuseum.org
The linear expression in Vargas-Suarez’s wall drawings define the planar surfaces of walls through a network of lines that he creates freehand. The artist proposes and infuses voids, inscribing lines over each other, around one another, overlapping, and reconstructing forms. His careful, studied technique is reminiscent of both scientific illustration and architectural drawing. In Vargas-Suarez’s work, the relationship between positive and negative space is constantly evoked by the movement of voids, lines, and planes that allude to architecture, space, scientific representation, the visible and invisible.
Space Station: Jersey is inspired by photographs of the Jersey City waterfront, architectural plans of the Hudson and Manhattan Powerhouse and other historical and modern buildings in Jersey City, particularly industrial buildings at the shores of the Hudson River. Linked in theory to cycles of astrological bodies and biological entities, the cyclical nature of industrial history and its effect on the urban landscape is explored in the forms of the wall drawing, as they move over and into one another.
Jersey City Museum through December 2005
350 Montgomery Street
Jersey City, NJ 07302
201.413.0303
www.jerseycitymuseum.org
Space Station: Liberty is based on the art deco forms of the original Jersey City Medical Center, built 1930-1941. The WPA project represents a hulking mass of buildings in the Jersey City landscape. Vargas-Suarez Universal meticulously studied the aging and decrepit buildings, compiling a body of images from which he created a wall drawing for the new Jersey City Medical Center.
Jersey City Medical Center, indefinitely
355 Grand Street, Jersey City, NJ 07302
Event Horizon In astrophysics, the Event Horizon is the position at which the force of gravity becomes inescapable, the point of no return. It also describes a place at which Vargas-Suarez Universal necessarily arrives at in the making of a wall drawing, when there is nothing left to do but plunge ahead.
Now, in three linked series, Vargas-Suarez Universal plays on institutional presentation, domestic and personal style – as well as on the ambition and scale of his own practice – by using photographs culled from glossy magazines and those shot on a recent trip to Europe as the basis for new ‘virtual’ projects. In addition, drawings made onto ‘retired’ satellite dishes exploit the concave and convex surfaces as a sculptural equivalent to the theoretical framework suggested by the title, Event Horizon: Time + Space Curvature.
exhibition:
Vargas – Suarez Universal: Event Horizon: Time + Space Curvature.
9 September – 23 October
g-module
15, rue Debelleyeme
75003 Paris
+33 1 42 71 14 75 www.g-module.com
