| Like the patriarchs of Pop Art in the mid-1950s, Alejandro Vigilante has had enough of painting for painting’s sake. Last year, the Argentine-born, Miami-based artist, who had been creating painterly abstracts for the entirety of his career, realized that he had something to say, and he wanted to say it with his art. Leaving the geometric, color-drenched tangle that had been his compositional mainstay behind, Vigilante dove into the current cultural milieu with his manifesto “Email is My Art,” and has never looked back. As much declaration as descriptor, the title proves the artist’s determination to create a vehicle worthy of his witticisms. |
 |
Alejandro Vigilante Says Screw Decorum – Saxon Henry
Like the patriarchs of Pop Art in the mid-1950s, Alejandro Vigilante has had enough of painting for painting’s sake. Last year, the Argentine-born, Miami-based artist, who had been creating painterly abstracts for the entirety of his career, realized that he had something to say, and he wanted to say it with his art.
Leaving the geometric, color-drenched tangle that had been his compositional mainstay behind, Vigilante dove into the current cultural milieu with his manifesto “Email is My Art,” and has never looked back. As much declaration as descriptor, the title proves the artist’s determination to create a vehicle worthy of his witticisms.
During my visit to his Wynwood studio, he asked, “What do you do when you see or hear something funny? In the past, you would have called a friend and had a good laugh. Now, you email those who share your sense of humor, sending a link or pasting the joke into an email. That’s our new reality and that’s what ‘Email is My Art’ is about.”
His smaller mixed media compositions are subtly striated and dichromatic while larger pieces are peppered with juicy colors. The artist paints or uses transfer and silkscreen techniques to bring his internet interpretations to life. His studio is a veritable cultural museum with the likenesses of Marilyn Monroe, John Lennon, Paris Hilton and James Dean squinting, smirking and smiling from all angles.
Monroe, Lennon and Dean are emailing for the first time, as the icons died before the internet was an ever-present part of everyday life. Their voices, along with a slew of other long-gone stars, make up Vigilante’s “WiFi in the Afterlife” series in which Dean remarks, “Dream as if you’ll live forever, e-mail as if you’ll die today.”
In his “Go To Gossip” series, he has pitted Paris Hilton against Britney Spears—Hilton explaining to Spears that when she advised her to shave her hair to get a man, she didn’t mean her head. A bald Britney retaliates, “You know what they say about blondes, right? ‘I don’t remember: I’m not, like, that smart.’ Touché!”
Vigilante’s exchanges have garnered a surprising amount of feedback—some of it charged, which leads him to believe he’s hitting a vital nerve. While some of the messages are simply humorous—Warhol chastising Basquiat for hanging out in Haring’s chat room, for instance—others are politically loaded, such as Che Guevara warning Fidel Castro that death will have a way of opening his eyes, his blank, post-mortem gaze a haunting visual to illustrate the message.
After decades of feeling as if he was not understood as an artist because his abstract work had little meaning, save the meaning it brought to his life, Vigilante, the self-described “Father of Email Art,” is on fire with inspiration. Today, for instance, he excitedly flips through cataloged ideas on his computer before striding resolutely to a row of large canvases to daub his measured messages with paint.
Only time will tell whether his insightful investigations into humanity’s drive to communicate will have as lasting an impact on the art world as the explorations by Pop Art’s progenitors did. Vigilante is more concerned with discovering new discourses, even if they dismiss decorum in the name of commanding content, than whether he’ll be remembered for them or not.
