Francisco Vargas (Barquisimeto, Venezuela 1959) is a Venezuelan artist residing in Brazil since 2000. With thirty-five years of artistic career, he has spent fifteen in Venezuela and twenty in Brazil. His ties with his country of origin have always remained, also recognizing the coexistence with the geography and culture of São Paulo.

He had his first years of education at the Escuela de Artes Visuales Cristóbal Rojas (1985-1989) in Caracas, a specialization in restoration of mural paintings in Peru, as part of a scholarship awarded by the OAS (1994) and then studied at the Universidad Central de Venezuela (1997). He was trained as a sculptor, and although he painted, his language was essentially three-dimensional. In his first pictorial stage in the nineties, while still in Caracas, he developed the series Aproximaciones arqueológicas para la memoria de ciudad que se pierde. For the artist “it is a reading about the city and how the environmental impact influences the construction of new urban landscapes.”

Upon his arrival in Brazil, for reasons of space, environmental regulations and a new reality, he faces a transition with what he was doing in Venezuela. He abandons sculpture and dedicates himself entirely to painting. He develops an urban landscape of different cities in the world, but focuses especially on the Brazilian landscape that will lead him to his current work entitled Ciudades ocultas.

The artist points out “what I paint are structures that suggest architectural forms of a landscape, in which there may or may not be people”. And he continues, “it is another way of looking at the urban landscape, from a more conventional and poetic perspective, but at the same time, without neglecting the intimate details (…). It is an abstract city, it is any city in the world ”.

The concept of the three-dimensional is present in his pictorial work through architecture and the urban. In his suggested, past, illusory or possible landscapes, the planes, the perspectives, the vanishing points and the transparencies lead to a dialogue between interior and exterior spaces, to a swing of the gaze between the intimate and the social.

Anny Bello