Interview With Alejandro Vigilante

Alejandro Vigilante, inspired by the world of the internet, is an influential figure in pop art. Painting the iconic figures of the century and their interactions with the internet, his work reflects on the contemporary social culture in a layered and structured form.
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Alejandro Vigilante, inspired by the world of the internet, is an influential figure in pop art. Painting the iconic figures of the century and their interactions with the internet, his work reflects on the contemporary social culture in a layered and structured form.

1 Where do you derive your influence from?

I have been influenced by American pop artist like Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol and the world of Internet, emails, computer language and social media, I’ve captured this virtual world in my pieces since 2001.

2 What was the last exhibition you went to?

Lately I have been featured in Arte Miami 2013 (Miami FL), Art Wynwood 2014 (Miami FL) and Art Cartagena 2014 (Cartagena, Colombia)

As a visitor these year 2014 I have gone to The Metropolitan Museum to see the exhibition of Henri Matisse, The Paris of Toulouse-Lautrec: Prints and Posters at the MoMA both in NYC and the exhibition of Antonio Berni at the MALBA in Buenos Aires Argentina

3 What are you currently working on?

I keep going in the process I started on 2001 of developing a new strain of Neo-Pop art, lightly titled “i-Pop” or sometimes referred to as “iArt”. Creating a new media reflecting the instant information exchange and image dilution made possible by the popularity of social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, Google, YouTube and Instagram among many others. I seek to advance the critical role of these online worlds in the physical bodies of artworks. I keep visualizing icons from the past incorporated to this fast world of emails and social media, combining old and new. We all know, the virtual world is very dynamic, is in continuous change as fast as the society progresses, new discoveries and technical advances come up and this also affects how social media is presented and is incredible how is people influenced, all these movements compels me to be aware and run on the same change speed of the amazing world of internet in order to adapt my work according to those fast variations.

4 How do you see the art market and the art world changing?

The arrival of the Internet and the intensification of digital culture are removing the little division that is left between high and popular culture that Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein started to diffuse back in the 60’s. Internet is permitting artists to showcase their work to a wider audience. The popularity of emerging artists has been increased by the fact that everyone can now access via the internet to check artist’s websites and contact information. The social media platform is not only launching the career of emerging artists, it is providing the world with an entirely new path to access art. Internet had also modified time factor, shortened distances between cause and effect, speeding up the communication speed itself.

Traditionally, artists had to first get recognition of the art critics, galleries and big name collectors, which would eventually lead to museum show, today artists, use Instagram, Facebook, Tweeters, websites boosted by Google, SEO and other searching tools like hashtags to create their own virtual art gallery and virtual art spaces, playing artist, dealer and curator while their fans or followers become critics and collectors, witnessing the creative process in real time. Now people are buying what they like.

Artists are getting force to study beyond of the traditional art matters to learn how to do a better marketing of themselves and are getting wiser on the use of these virtual tools.

In other hands, contemporary art is becoming an anarchic mix of media, techniques and ideas, which is bringing richness to the art world on my point of view.

5 What genre of art are you particularly invested in?

I think my taste is evolving, I buy things across most flat media; paintings, drawings, photographs, however don’t discard to invest in sculptures in the near future

6 How do you see art emerging from the tech space?

I see that art from tech spaces is increasing, digital art is everywhere, digital designers is a career in expansion; actually I consider that most of people who do digital design don’t realize they are doing art, people when in front of their computers or intelligent phones are doing art because emails, texts, tweeters, the bodies of chats are expressions of art, internet is art, nowadays Internet is more popular than Campbell’s soups!

I like digital art and this is the point where my work begins, because I first see the images on the computer screen, I capture those images that then by using designing tools I design over the image to make it suitable in contrast and dimension to be finally materialized in a painting.

I have added a variation to my work to make it accessible to all budgets, now my pieces are printed in metal and plexiglass, which are colorful and bright similar to a computer screen, I would say is the closest thing in the real world of what I see on my computer screen when the design is ready. I’ve found this media is more attractive to young people.

You are invited to come to my studio in Lincoln Rd Miami Beach, to see the process I have develop after studying different techniques and a lot of experimentation.

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