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Labor: A survey of Works by Angel Vapor

Aluna Art Foundation  announce in its new season an exhibition of works by Angel Vapor curated by Ricardo Pau Llosa. A distinguished sculptor who has worked in myriad media—cast bronze and steel as well as carved and assembled wood and stone, clay and ceramics—Vapor has also mastered painting, drawing, and various modes of printmaking.

Works in all these media are on display at this exhibition whose title, Labor, emphasizes several ambiguities and themes in Vapor’s work: the importance of craft, the focus on the everyday working man (industrial laborer, farmer, soldier, fire-fighter, among others), and the fusion of time-honored techniques in art with the intellectual rigors of conceptualism. The title also evokes the act of giving birth. All the exacting activities of human psyche—from the menial to the transcendent (samurai and meditating monks are recurring themes, as well) share equal status in Vapor’s epic view of labor as the primary joy, not the burden, of life.

Mere intellectual play on aesthetic notions, onerous technicism in the name of skill, and brute toil are not, by themselves, art because they are not Labor—the activity that unifies thought, beauty, discipline, and skill and thus the only consistent and trustworthy path to personal fulfillment.

Vapor was born in Cuba in 1970. A graduate of the prestigious San Alejandro Academy and the ENAP (National School of the Visual Arts), both in Havana, Vapor left Cuba for Spain in 1994 and, in 1999, emigrated to the United States making South Florida his home for the last 15 years. His previous solo exhibition in Miami took place in 2011 at the Farside Gallery and was curated by Ricardo Pau-Llosa, who is also the curator of Labor. Vapor was one of the artists Pau-Llosa highlighted in his article “Four from Miami: McKnight, Sardi, Thiele, and Vapor” in Sculpture magazine that same year. Vapor’s activity as an artist spans monumental sculptures, ephemeral installations, and major construction and remodeling projects of important residences in South Florida. Throughout, the abiding theme in his work is the same: only through the fusion and intersection of disciplines and activities falsely assumed to be disparate can the imagination create original works of art whose meaning and significance may be genuinely thought of as universal.

LABOR The title of this exhibition emphasizes themes central to the artist’s visual thinking: the importance of craft, the focus on the everyday working man (industrial laborer, farmer, soldier, fire-fighter, among others), and the fusion of time-honored techniques in art with the intellectual rigors of conceptualism. The title also evokes the act of giving birth. All the exacting activities of human psyche—from the menial to the transcendent (samurai and meditating monks are recurring themes, as well) share equal status in Vapor’s epic view of labor as the primary joy, not the burden, of life. Mere intellectual play on aesthetic notions, onerous technicism in the name of skill, and brute toil are not, by themselves, art because they are not Labor—the activity that unifies thought, beauty, discipline, and skill and thus the only consistent and trustworthy path to personal fulfillment. Only through the fusion and intersection of disciplines and activities falsely assumed to be disparate can the imagination create original works of art whose meaning and significance may be genuinely thought of as universal.

Ricardo Pau LLosa, Curator

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