LABOR: A Survey of Works by Angel Vapor, at Aluna Art Foundation, Miami

April 11 – May 17, 2014

Curated by Ricardo Pau-Llosa

LABOR: A Survey of Works by Angel Vapor, at Aluna Art Foundation, Miami.  -The title of this exhibition of works by Angel Vapor (b. 1970 in Cuba, in US since 1999), Labor, 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.