A family of ghosts embodied by extraordinary individuals.
Angel Vergara (BE)
Angel Vergara became known as Straatman through his interventions in the city; hidden under a white sheet, he draws in real-time what is happening around him. He later appears in performances where he disrupts official cultural contexts, disguised as the King of the Belgians or transforming an art gallery into a café.
Straatman is, above all, a performing specter.
In the streets, blind under his sheet, he is alert to his surroundings, listening, capturing the murmurs of his environment, noting, transcribing, emitting signs, and painting.
He unsettles reality, makes an impression, and like any ghost, he can sometimes be frightening, even if he seems harmless.
The most moving moments occur when new existences appear, as if emerging from the mist, requiring their reality to be intensified. Or, conversely, when the task is to grasp their dissolution, replacing them with specters, reviving ghostly portraits, or subjecting images to a space of appearance/disappearance—undoing the instantaneous nature of filmed or captured images and their so-called “realism,” liquefying their forms and dissolving them into color before making them resurface, as if from deep amnesia.
One could say, quoting Étienne Souriau, that with Angel’s works, we enter a world where the solidity of bodies, the clarity of contours, and the fixity of images dissipate in favor of three verbs that affect all modes of existence:
Appear, disappear, reappear.
Infos
| DATE | CONTENU |
|---|---|
| 2025/04/191530 |
19.04.2025 15:30 Botanique, Saint-Josse-ten-Noode |
Botanique terraces, free access.
Straatman: écoute-voir ! is created with artists from Créahmbxl (Création et Handicap Mental). Créahmbxl helps position outsider art within the field of contemporary art and promotes the idea of creative difference.
In collaboration with Créahm (Creativity and Mental Disability). Co-produced with Botanique.
