Leonardo Vargas - Strasbourg, France, Painting

A photograph arrives in the studio already carrying its own history, a fashion campaign, a nineteenth-century daguerreotype, a frame pulled from a VHS tape.
 Leonardo Vargas does not reproduce it. He runs it through oil paint until the surface starts to fail, and the failure becomes the subject.

The source matters less than what happens to it. A glossy advertising image and a scratched historical plate receive the same treatment, layered pigment, deliberate blur, a hand that interrupts the mechanical eye.

What results sits between the coldness of the copied image and the warmth of the gesture that undid it.

Vargas treats the flaw as structure, not accident. Where the image stops resolving, the paint begins to hold something the photograph could not.

Flesh, in this practice, never settles into a fixed likeness. Faces arrive layered with brushstrokes that both build and dismantle a head at once, drips and blank passages standing in for what the source image withheld to begin with.

 Daguerreotype, painted on board, pushes this logic against its own reference point: a nineteenth-century portrait process, already an unstable image by nature, is driven further into grain, static, and the kind of degradation associated with an object aging past legibility.

The painting does not restore the sitter it borrows from. It lets them recede instead.

L'attente, worked from a VHS loop rather than a historical plate, carries the same argument through a different decade of image technology.

Vargas paints the tracking error, the horizontal drift a failing tape produces, as a compositional device rather than a technical accident to be smoothed over.

Across both bodies of work, whether the source is a fashion campaign or a corroded archive, the same operation repeats: an existing image is stripped of its authority and handed back to the hand that repaints it.

What results carries an unstable presence, a sense that the visible is only the residue of something fuller the process declined to preserve.

Vargas, born in Barrancabermeja, Colombia, trained across three cities before this became a working method rather than a subject: fine arts and art history in Bogotá, an MFA in Utrecht, and a doctorate at the Université de Strasbourg completed in 2024 with a dissertation on pictorial production in the digital age.

The research and the studio practice appear to run on the same question, tested first as an argument and later as paint.

Represented by Galerie Bertrand Gillig in Strasbourg, Galerie Lessirard in the PACA region of France, and 171 Gallery in Switzerland, he exhibits regularly across both countries, with a show titled after his method, Essays on Imperfection, opening at 171 Gallery in Lucerne this year.

What sits on the screen or the plate before Vargas intervenes is already unstable. The painting only refuses to pretend otherwise.

Leonardo Vargas on Instagram