Artists Registry

ALEJANDRO VIGILANTE i-Art Movement + Artist Statement

I’ve moved through many phases during my life as an artist, from traditional themes in my early paintings to more modern themes during the past several years. As I have entered a new phase of exploration in my painting during the past two years, I count Lichtenstein, Warhol and Rauschenberg among my most important inspirations.

I have been painting since I was four years old; my first attempts at putting a brush and a palette knife to canvas a way to connect with my father, Argentine painter Juan Vigilante, who died that same year. During the following four decades, I struggled to perfect my technique and to learn everything I could about how to be the best painter I could be, but in the last several years, I have felt my desire shift toward a need to understand what it is I would like to say as an artist as I realized that art is yet another medium for communication.

To this end, I am currently creating a series of works that constitute a reimagination of the Pop Art Movement, which built on Dadaism’s ridicule of highbrow art and created a bridge between the fine arts and commercial art in the US. While the progenitors of Pop Art gleaned their ideas from comic books, advertisements, packaging, film and television, they were thumbing their noses at abstract expressionism in an effort to bring a lightheartedness to art that had been lacking.

Though there was glamour in Andy Warhol’s images of celebrities, there was playfulness in his immortalization of Campbell’s soup cans. Roy Lichtenstein’s comic-strip icons were certainly witty, but his paintings like “Woman with Peanuts” were purely whimsical. Not since Warhol, Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, David Hockney and James Rosenquist has the art world had a renaissance: until now. Like the fathers of Pop, I am exploring new territory in order to infuse the fine arts with a heightened lightheartedness, glamour and wit.

Just as Pop’s founders were catering to popular tastes, my E-mail Art, an exploration of Internet minutia, satisfies the most modern soul—those voracious junkies of anything that floats across their computer screens. This soul could not have been imagined by Pop Art’s creators because the internet was just being developed during their time of explosive creativity. It wasn’t until 1969 that the first computer whiz “logged on” to a Stanford Research Institute computer and transferred data from one location to another.

Mimicking Pop Art’s heroes, I draw from film, television, comic books and advertisements for my humorous repartee, but mine is a new wave of Popism, which has intelligence as the underlying principle rather than visual stimulus without meaning. There is no substrata of society that is immune to my roving eye. You can see for yourself on my web site, www.emailismyart.com. I call my content/image- based oeuvre the i-Art Movement.

ALEJANDRO VIGILANTE · 305-607-7648 · vigilan9@aol.com

408 West 25th Street, #9 · Miami Beach, FL 33140

WWW.EMAILISMYART.COM