Games of Love and Chance

"Los juegos del amor y del azar" is from the period when Jorge de la Vega, along with the other members of the Nueva Figuración collective (Luis Felipe Noé, Rómulo Maccio,́ and Ernesto Deira), was attempting to go beyond the old dichotomy between figuration and abstraction to enable forms to emerge seemingly spontaneously from the pictorial matter. Large-format gestural paintings produced using unorthodox materials in addition to oil and other paints had been explored in the late nineteen-fifties by informalist artists. What the Nueva Figuración artists were after, however, was a new balance within that compositional chaos. De la Vega’s “Bestiario” [Bestiary] or “Monstruos” series of which this work form part is from that period. To compose what could be called an inventory of overblown expressionist beings, de la Vega used not only paint but also mirrors, stones, pieces of tin, and plastic pieces from board games in operations that seem to anticipate the interest in pop art that would blossom in his work a few years later. The tactile and visual sensations triggered in part by the porousness of the canvas give viewers the sense that the figures in the painting emerged of their own accord.