Artist:
Sergio Vega (born 1959 in Buenos Aires, Argentina; lives and works in Gainesville, USA).

Materials:
Laminated Adhesive Vinyl Mounted on Sintra.

Description:
“The project Shanty Nucleus After Derrida 2, (previously shown at the Museum of the Americas in Washington DC), was inspired by the installation series titled “Nucleus” that artist Helio Oiticica’s made between 1960 and 1963. Vega’s project borrows from Oiticica’s work the display of color planes suspended in space. Yellow constructions of plastic material hung down from the ceiling creating an array of formations and walkways that enable a ‘penetrable’ interactive viewing experience. Photographic images taken by the artist representing precarious and informal dwellings and low-income housing projects in Brazil have been dissected and inserted onto the sculptural configurations of colored planes. By destabilizing the logic between image and support, these images of precarious constructions establish a dialectical relationship with the pristine constructed nature of the installation that contains them. ‘Deconstruction exists in its applications as shantytowns exist in the context of the city—eccentrically. Their emergence can be interpreted as a response to the city’s hegemonic centralized entity. Shantytowns come into being as a deconstruction of the city in the most literal sense; these precarious, informal dwellings are often erected from recycled materials discarded by the city and its industries’.”
—Press release, “Kabe Contemporary opens ‘Disassembling Paradise’ by artist Sergio Vega,” Artdaily website.

“Shanty Nucleus after Derrida 2 is explicit in its reference to the series of Oiticica’s nuclei, in which the artist created chromatic environments with multiple panels painted in intense colors in gradual tones, only Vega places a much greater emphasis on the perceptive experience. While Oiticica resorted after this series to the sources of samba and to the party-color associations, fruit of his relationship with os mangueirantes (members of the samba school of Cerro Mangueira), Vega chooses to re-signify the constructive side on the basis of the same type of source. He chooses the logic of experience; he is interested in the operations of mounting/dismounting the dwellings built in the most adverse conditions. These are the ones he portrays and prints on the panels of nuclear color, playing in turn with the forms in positive and negative, volume, and the angles that escape the plane. Thus he gradually takes possession of the gallery space, seizing little by little an environment which at first sight would appear to be Cartesian, subject to a logical construction immersed in a white cube.”
—Marivi Véliz, “Sergio Vega,” arte al día website.