The restoration of democracy in Chile and Spain brought with it a peculiar phenomenon in both countries: a rush to turn the page and embrace the emerging postmodern era. This urgency led to the hasty—and often unjust—dismissal of an entire generation of artists who had worked under dictatorship, while others, who quickly aligned themselves with trendy movements, were disproportionately celebrated. Realism was one of the casualties. Even the renowned Antonio López struggled to find acceptance in the collection of Spain’s prestigious MNCARS, the country’s premier contemporary art museum. Similarly, the landscape painters of the influential Madrid School, the heart of a diverse figurative movement, were erased from memory, along with their followers. Meanwhile, the euphoria over newfound modernity sparked an unprecedented buying frenzy, with countless artists—now entirely forgotten—selling massive quantities of work at exorbitant prices. This bubble persisted until the Gulf War, when collectors, hit by the crisis, attempted to offload even the most coveted pieces, causing the market to collapse spectacularly.
These events are worth recalling because they resonate with the life and career of Carlos Vega. In the essay written by art historian Pedro Emilio Zamorano Pérez for Vega’s 2007 exhibition at Madrid’s Ansorena Gallery, the importance of travel for artists was emphasized. Vega sought in Spain the cradle of Western pictorial tradition, particularly realism, which emerged in the Baroque period—unlike the Renaissance, which idealized the human form within rigid geometric constructs. He was drawn to Velázquez’s portraits of humble figures, such as *The Waterseller of Seville* or *The Little Buffoon*. Vega needed to visit the Prado Museum, an extraordinary institution that has influenced countless contemporary artists, from Hockney to Bacon, despite modernism’s foundational rejection of academic tradition (Picasso, for instance, never returned to Franco’s Spain yet was deeply shaped by the Louvre). Above all, Vega sought a place where realism was still valued. In Spain, as in Chile, the climate was hostile, but there was one refuge: the academy of a Chilean painter who had found success in 1980s Madrid by capturing the denizens of the night—addicts, punks, and other icons of the famed *movida madrileña*. When Vega arrived on a grant to study under Guillermo Muñoz Vera, the artist had shifted his focus to the textures of traditional materials—lime, clay, earth—but had developed an academic teaching method so effective that students could produce competent realist paintings within months. These still lifes and interiors of Muñoz Vera’s rustic academy formed the core of Vega’s first exhibition at Milan’s Marieschi Gallery (2003), where his mentor praised his “mastery of technique: balanced compositions, color modulation, three-dimensionality, atmosphere, precision, and economy of means.”
Yet contemporary photorealism, hyperrealism, or simply realism is not merely an extension of 19th-century academicism—an absurd notion, given that academic painting had already achieved perfection just as photography arrived to take its place—nor is it a continuation of Western tradition from Altamira to Picasso (who, despite ushering in the 20th century with *Les Demoiselles d’Avignon* in 1907, also closed the book on the 19th, prompting some to argue for his inclusion in the Prado). Instead, it is a movement born in the 1970s to critically examine the image as a mass-consumed object, or the saturation of images enabled by photography (and later, film and television). This idea is hardly original: Lucie Smith’s *Art Today* (1976, revised in 1981), a popular survey, notes that hyperrealism engages more with photography than with nature—Chuck Close’s colossal enlargements are a prime example. In this sense, photorealism is linked to, or even a consequence of, Pop Art, which likewise explores the consumption of icons and the icons of consumption (Warhol’s *Brillo Box*, with its garish four-color prints of mass idols like Marilyn or Jagger, is a foundational work that inspired Arthur Danto’s Institutional Theory). Critic Catherine D. Anspon highlighted this connection in her preface to Vega’s 2021 solo show at Houston’s Art of the World Gallery: “The artist first evokes Pop Art, born in the 1960s with figures like Warhol, Lichtenstein, Rosenquist, and Oldenburg, alongside British contemporaries such as David Hockney, Allen Jones, Richard Hamilton, Gerald Laing, and Derek Boshier. Then there’s the cult of photorealism, an American phenomenon tied to the ’60s and ’70s, championed by painters like Richard Estes, Robert Bechtle, Ralph Goings, Audrey Flack, and Chuck Close.” It’s worth remembering that, until the 20th century, a European peasant might have encountered only a handful of images in their lifetime, mostly religious. Today, we are drowning in them—even if we tear our eyes away from our phones, which spew an endless stream of increasingly vapid visuals, images still assault us at every turn.
Vega’s bags of museum catalogs fit squarely within this contemporary realist tradition: they are mass-consumed objects (museum catalogs, the paintings they reproduce, even the museums themselves, now reduced to tourist attractions like the Eiffel Tower or the Grand Canyon), mass-consumed images, and a clear dialogue with photography (Vega literally paints photographs, much like Malcolm Morley’s 1966 *SS Amsterdam in Front of Rotterdam*, a postcard reproduction often considered the first photorealist painting). But there’s something else here, subtler and easily overlooked: the plastic bag. Contemporary realism introduces a decisive element absent from traditional painting (and from Muñoz Vera’s academy where Vega honed his craft): synthetic materials.
When landscape painting was invented during Romanticism, so too was modern art theory (with figures like Winckelmann, the founder of modern aesthetics and neoclassicism’s great theorist). Just as *the Beautiful* was distinguished from *the Sublime*, attempts were made to define the “picturesque”—that which was worthy of being painted. We can all imagine it: the quaint valley, the peasant in traditional dress, the whitewashed village, the clay jug, the wilted flower (not to mention the dreadful 19th-century history paintings or mythological scenes). In short, what we still consider “picturesque,” though now from a safe distance. I’ve always enjoyed contrasting this notion of “worthiness” with the subject of synthetic materials: plastic, synthetic paint, asphalt, the modern city (those labyrinths of reflections and right-angled structures beloved by Estes), cars, smartphones—none of these are picturesque. This is why photorealism carries a certain aggression, an aridity that unsettles us: these things don’t belong in a painting. A Coca-Cola can, a plastic bag, a computer—they feel unworthy, even offensive when rendered in meticulous oil. Their presence feels like a betrayal of the grand tradition. Academicism never confronted this problem: even when 19th-century Realism (think Courbet) tackled industry, railroads, cargo ships, or cities, it still dealt with noble, elemental materials—stone, iron, fire. Our era has changed everything: we’ve invented the artificial, textures alien to nature in every way—they don’t even biodegrade. This is why Vega’s shift away from the noble materials of his Italian debut and the gardens that once captivated him is so apt: ambitious realism cannot retreat into the picturesque. It must show us—art makes things real, teaches us to see the world—the reality we inhabit, which is neither kind nor noble. And it must reflect on painting’s role in today’s jungle of images.
The critique of the museum institution—whose unsustainable overcrowding, as seen with the Mona Lisa or the Sistine Chapel, is now common knowledge—underpins Vega’s work. Alberto Madrid Letelier addressed this in his preface to Vega’s 2019 solo show at Ansorena, aptly titled *Souvenir Culture*. Quoting Benjamin’s *The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction* (1936) (“which anticipates how art, shaped by technology and production systems, would become a commodity”), Letelier noted that Vega’s *Tourist Series* (2019), featuring visitors photographing artworks, captures “characters as image collectors, reflecting an era defined by consumer aesthetics, souvenir culture, and artistic capitalism.” He also cited precedents like “paintings within paintings” or Malraux’s *Imaginary Museum*. Today, in what Hal Foster called the *age of cynical reason*, interventions in museums and galleries are relentless and often radical: artists locking doors on opening night (Hirst), taping gallerists to walls (Cattelan), staging dead museum directors on fire escapes, or filling halls with empty fairground stalls to protest extravagant, hollow art investments. In Vega’s *Museum Bags* series, also exhibited in 2019, vibrant branded paper bags replaced even the catalog reproductions of masterpieces. Yet amid this institutional critique, this reckoning with art’s commodification, this bold embrace of ungainly materials like plastic, there remains a painter who grew up in a small Chilean town, crossed an ocean to study the masters, and pays homage to them in every brushstroke. And that, in the end, is what truly matters.
Javier Rubio Nomblot
Bachelor of Fine Arts
Art critic, ABC Cultural, Madrid
