JOSÉ LUIS VARGAS: PHENOMENON

José Luis Vargas

We’ve Arrived

2011

oil and enamel on canvas

77 ½" x 88”

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PHENOMENON

JOSÉ LUIS VARGAS

31 AUG 2024 - 31 JAN 2025

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José Luis Vargas is an exceptional visual artist, an educator of generations of artists, a committed community leader, and a tireless humanist who is constantly searching for alternate realities and also, most importantly, insight into the human existence with all its layers and profundities. In short: He is a phenomenon. What amazes many of us who have followed his career is his ability to precisely capture supernatural, paranormal phenomena, myths and legends in his art with depth, humor, and, above all, respect for their believers. Vargas is an avid explorer and chronicler of the human need to understand our existence, of our constant desire to connect with the here and the beyond, with the intangible, fantastic, or ethereal.

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Vargas grew up in the Puerto Rico of the 1970s, which was a time of surreal news headlines that ran the gamut from sightings of escaped convict Toño Bicicleta and the roaming chimpanzee Yuyo, to showings of science fiction B-movies in which the masked wrestler El Santo would fight vampires and other monsters, to the ever-present predictions of Walter Mercado, the most flamboyant of all television astrologers. Insert into the mix all the UFOs that purportedly landed on the west coast of the island, the discovery of alien sea creatures, vampires, the Chupacabras and other beings that have reportedly been seen in our land and inhabited our imagination, and it’s no surprise that Vargas would become so curious about extraordinary phenomena.

All these elements converge in José Luis Vargas’s artistic practice. He is drawn by myths, superstitions, spiritual longings, explorations of the soul, and ancestral beliefs that have beguiled humankind since its origins. Superpowers, telepathy, apparitions, paranormal experiences, monsters, superheroes, and freaks have existed and persisted throughout the history of humankind as the subjects of our myths, legends, dreams, and fears. Vargas’s works do not exist in a vacuum: they are part of our popular culture in which we consume the plots of older fables and legends in comic books and movies with their origin myths.

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