Go Go Go

Jorge de la Vega was a member of the Other Figuration group in Argentina in the early 1960s, which advocated a return to the figure as a vehicle for expressing existential anxieties. Living in New York from 1965–67, he was both fascinated and repulsed by popular US television, magazines, and especially advertising. His style changed dramatically as, in his words, he bade “goodbye to mythological figures and the search for man. North America is such a powerful and artificial world that by contrast man acquires relief.” This female nude hovering upon a rainbow against the city’s skyline epitomizes De la Vega’s conception of this “artificial world,” and the body mythologies it inspired. In a personalized, psychedelic Pop style, he repeats her laughing face on either side of her head, extending her grimace across the painting. He gives her a monstrously distended body, as well as an extra hand ending in talons; she is crass capitalism, vividly personified. As fellow Argentine artist Luis Felipe Noé later remarked about De La Vega’s US period: “With his eyes of an artist from an underdeveloped country, he looked at the most developed country, and X-rayed it cruelly.”